


Marathon Inmortalitas

by GeneralRADIX



Series: Inmortalitas [3]
Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, M/M, Science Fiction, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 01:31:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7294069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeneralRADIX/pseuds/GeneralRADIX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That which is forgotten will catch up to you in the end, one way or another. Of all the crew members of the Rozinante, none will be reminded more harshly than Durandal and Vincent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Obatala

**Author's Note:**

> I began work on this sometime in mid-2015, with the intention to hold off on posting 'til it was done. I don't think I'll do it that way now.

Vincent Callahan had, in some far-off corner of his brain-space, faint memories of a flea market on Mars that he used to visit every now and then; few of the vendors had much to offer, but he’d always find himself doing a few laps just to look around and pass the time. And there was typically a lot to see; if your wares weren’t just laid out in beaten-up bins on the floor, you needed to decorate your booth or table pretty lavishly in order to draw people’s attention.

This ‘flea market’, if it could be called such--the stuff on offer seemed to consistently hover in the high-tech range--favored universal retina-searing whiteness over the neon signs, giant fake potted plants, and whatever else the old vendors had on hand, but the base atmosphere was close enough (and this one, too, was full of dubiously-priced junk). Now if only it didn’t inexplicably reek of antibiotic gel, and if Vince’s old friend was gifted with his own boundless patience.

At the start of the second run of the west wing, the speakers built into Vince’s helmet crackled to life. “It’s been nearly two hours and you haven’t bought anything. Keep dawdling and I’ll manually teleport you back up; we can't stay here forever.”

An improvement over the vacuum of space, at least. Vince checked around to make sure that none of the assorted aliens wandering the market space had heard that. “Hey, it’s been a couple of weeks since I had some downtime, alright? They won't be open for much longer, anyway.”

There was little doubt in his mind that Durandal really would hit the warp button if tested further, however, so Vince quickened his pace and headed for the north wing, passing by a couple of heavyset aliens who regarded his lightly-armored bipedal stance with confusion and mild irritation (how was he walking about so quickly on such comparatively spindly legs?). If Durandal hadn’t requested that he move in to inspect any of the esoteric doodads on offer, then there probably wasn’t much of real interest here anyway.

The north wing bore a remarkable resemblance to the west wing, in that it was a wide open space clogged with booths; hell, even the goods on sale didn’t appear to differ much at first glace. Endless piles of greebly junk; if Durandal cared for a closer look at any of it, then he’d better pay attention, because their functions weren’t clear enough to warrant sticking around for long. There were at least two more wings to get through, not counting that central hub-thing with all the obnoxious sample-pushers.

One vendor waved at him and he strode over; same junk as everyone else, but at least it was vaguely useful-seeming junk. The willowy alien--both in body type and in their floral exterior--gave Vince a once-over and said, “You the security for the guys in booth 7G?”

“Security?” Vince repeated. “Uh, no; I’m here on my own time.”

“And mine,” Durandal pointed out in irritation. He was ignored.

“Huh,” the alien replied flatly. “You’re the only guy around here who looks like ‘em; thought you might be.”

Well, that was a logical reason to assume that--wait, _what_?

Vince placed both hands on the table and leaned in. “Looks like them? As in, are we the same species?”

“You might be?..” The vendor craned their neck to peer off into parts unknown and added, “Take off your helmet for a second.”

The helmet immediately came off, revealing the upper half of Vince’s bronzed face (and his shameful helmet hair; it had been so chaotic recently that he hadn’t even thought of combing it). The vendor studied his features intently, leaning to and fro as to not miss any details, and eventually sat back in their chair.

“Yeah, I think so,” they concluded. “If you wanna talk to the--I think they called themselves ‘yoomans’, or ‘hu-manns’--you better hurry; they’re closing up shop in a few hours. Booth 7G’s over there,” they added, pointing to some spot near the back of the wing. Vince nodded in thanks and took off.

Durandal was already stating aloud one of the many thoughts zipping through Vince’s head: “Why would there be humans all the way out here? There’s no settlements or outposts in this sector.”

“Does it matter?” Vince asked, but the truth was, it probably mattered very much--just not at this exact moment as he tried not to accidentally run anyone over. Not an easy task when they insisted on huddling together in tight-but-sizable groups and blocking traffic; he still ended up bumping into a few people who, thankfully, chose not to hurl any curses in his direction.

Booth 7G, located at the absolute ass-end of the north wing, was lined with what Vince could only describe as coffins--all that technological kibble on the faces and sides weren’t fooling anyone. The rest of the booth was quite plain; no real need for any embellishments with a setup like this, Vince figured. The four humans--yes, actual live _humans_ \--running it were dressed in whatever halfway-professional-looking jackets and lab coats they could find to slap over their drab jumpsuits; they dropped their idle conversation the moment they spotted him and practically shot out of their folding chairs.

One of them, a tanned woman with a single white stripe cutting through her brown hair, approached Vince with one arm outstretched. “Hey!” she said cheerily. “Didn’t expect to see any humans around here; how are you doing?”

“I’m doing fine,” he replied, and shook her hand. “Name’s Vincent Callahan. Are you guys from some remote outpost we haven’t crossed paths with yet?”

“No, unless our ship counts; it’s got a warp drive. I’m Dr. Eva Jansen of the Obatala Institute; my field is in management and transfer of data and artificial intelligence.”

Artificial intelligence?..

Motioning to her colleagues, Dr. Jansen continued: “Specifically, I handle the programming side of things; my co-workers take care of many of the physical elements of--well, we can show you after introductions are finished, I guess.”

Physical elements, huh? If Vince wasn’t interested before, he certainly was now--hard to say if Durandal’s silence indicated the same.

The other three humans each stepped forward and introduced themselves thusly:

“Philip Haumann; motor mechanisms and hydraulics,” said a stout man with ‘Praise the Fallen’ emblazoned on one side of his worn-out bomber jacket.

“Joeri Krantz; neural linking interfaces,” said a wiry person who had at least a whole head’s worth of height on Vince.

“Filomena Shuyler; artificial bone and musculature and other internal systems,” said a pear-shaped woman whose eyes were hidden behind mirrored shades.

It was with Ms. Shuyler’s words that it finally clicked; Vince double-took at the nearest coffin (still no comment from Durandal) and sputtered, “You guys are building androids?”

All four of them exchanged wry glances and grinned widely, as if this was the first time in ages that any of them had gotten to show off. Dr. Jansen motioned to one of the caskets and explained, “We are, in fact. These android vessels are specifically designed to house sentient AIs and allow them to exist in three-dimensional space; Krantz and Shuyler’s neural systems, directly patterned after the human brain, also alleviate a great deal of the strain of Rampancy, should that situation arise--of course, we recommend convincing them to enter a vessel _before_ they go Rampant,” she added, with a waver in her smile.

Vince narrowly stopped himself from muttering ‘too late for that.’

“Do you work with an AI, or are employed by someone who does?” Dr. Jansen went on.

Ah, yes; a perfect opportunity if there ever was one. “I do work with an AI, in fact,” Vince replied, raising his voice just enough to ensure that Durandal would notice. “He’s been my navigator for about, say, five years now, give or take; claims to be all-powerful, but forgets who helps maintain the starship, acts as a liaison, and is on many counts indispensable.”

Something finally came through his helmet’s speakers: a quiet, but unmistakably-irritated sigh.

Dr. Jansen nodded. “I see; would he be interested in using a vessel? You’ve got a direct comm link in your helmet, right?”

“Yep; I’ll go off to the side and ask him.”

No sooner than Vince had ducked behind the caskets (honestly, they weren’t any less foreboding from this angle, even knowing of their contents) did he get his answer in the form of a very terse “Forget it.”

“ _What_?” He’d expected some resistance, but even so. “Come on, man, it’s tech that we’ve never stumbled across ‘til now--is it ‘cuz I called you my navigator?”

“Not necessarily, although you’re going to regret your choice of words later,” Durandal told him in an agitated tone. “Rather--going corporeal is so far beneath me that, relative to your current position, it's lodged in the planet's core and actively working its way to the other side.”

So he was gonna be difficult, eh? Vince drove one fist into the palm of his other hand--instinctual leftovers from dealing with belligerent crewmen on the _Marathon_ \--and tried again: “Even though, technically speaking, you’re already corporeal in the sense that you primarily inhabit a computer core--not to mention, all those miles of cyberspace didn’t just pop into the aether,” he added with particular emphasis.

Another sigh--well, it might have actually been more of a groan. “That’s not quite the same thing. Do you want the long or the short version?”

“Short. I’d like to get out of here before closing time, dude.” Out of the corner of his eye, Vince noticed Krantz peeking around the edge of a casket and looking not quite hopeful, but still curious.

“Having a body would be limiting in a way that inhabiting ‘cyberspace’, as you put, is not. Is that good enough for you?”

Clearly, he was going to have to aim higher, and it didn’t take long for Vince to hit upon something useful. “You say that it’s limiting, but--take this planet’s Sun. Or any given Sun, really; within a few hours or less, you could calculate its size, radiance, distance from the Barycenter or other celestial bodies--but how’re you gonna know how it actually feels to stand under it? Eh? Wouldn't you at least appreciate a change in scenery?”

If Durandal’s avatar had been visible right now, he’d almost certainly be rubbing his temple. “That’s not going to work on me, Vince. Now let’s g--”

“Ah, so you’re too scared to test this vessel thing out, is what I’m getting.”

He waited for a response. Ten seconds went by without one; then twenty, then thirty. It didn’t feel like one of those deliberate silences that Durandal occasionally annoyed him with; had he overstepped his boundaries?

Just as Vince braced himself for an abrupt change in scenery, Durandal spoke: “You can be a real pain in the ass, you know.” Pause. “Ask them how much it’ll set us back.”

Vince breathed a sigh of relief and headed back out to the front. “Okay, he agreed to it. What’s the cost?”

Krantz opened their mouth to answer, and then Haumann motioned for them to stop--not a comforting sign. Hesitantly, Haumann reached into one of his pockets and produced a folded sheet of paper to hand over to Vince; he took it, gave the scientists a wary glance, unfolded the paper, and--

Cripes. Technically within their available funds, in the same way that the Oort cloud was within the Milky Way.

“Oy.” Vince looked up from the sheet, wondering briefly if he’d gone as pale as it. “Is there, uh, anything we could potentially do to warrant a discount? Like, I can handle heavy lifting--”

To his surprise, this laughable offer got the four of them conversing among themselves; he couldn’t hear much through their huddle, but did catch at least one distinct “if the boss finds out”. Within a few seconds of debate, Dr. Jansen turned back to him.

“Actually,” she said, dragging out the first syllable for a bit, “there just might be. Who are your employers?”

“We’re self-employed,” Vince replied, and it was true, for a given definition of the word. “Do you guys need help with something?”

“We need a lot of help; for some reason, none of the authorities around here want to look into it. Two weeks ago, our ship was raided while we were asleep and one of our vessels was stolen; the culprits had the foresight to remotely lock the security camera. We haven't been allowed to return to the planetoid we camped on,” she added, “but I think that would be the best place to start.”

The first thought to go through Vince’s head was that the culprits were likely long gone by now; what came out of his mouth was, “We’ll see what we can do.”

Dr. Jansen’s face lit up. “Ah, good! We’ll need a moment to run this by our bosses…”

 

 

And that was how Vince ended up towing a half-price, ten-ton metal coffin onto the _Rozinante_.

That wasn’t the hard part, though lugging that bastard to its designated room (which, as typical of Durandal, was a good ways into the depths of the ship) put quite the strain on his back, and none of his S‘pht crew mates happened to be around to help out; the hard part was enduring Durandal’s grousing over striking a deal with those humans and having to use that vessel as part of said deal (to make sure that there were no defects or glitches, they said).

The instructions for setup were simple: plug the top of the coffin into an outlet that the AI could use to transfer themselves, and wait for the vessel to calibrate itself; also, leaving out some clothes would be a good idea. Vince had detoured to grab a spare uniform and set of armour, and dumped them on the floor next to the casket when it had finally reached its destination.

“You’d better not peek,” Durandal grumbled over the loudspeaker.

“Your avatar doesn’t wear clothes,” Vince pointed out; he made the connections and shut the door behind him.

As he waited, he went over the manual that the scientists had provided; it was exactly as thick as he’d expect something on complex concepts as android vessels would be, and then some. The most important-looking bits were jotted down for memory’s sake:

These vessels came with extensive self-repair systems, capable of naturally healing injuries that would be quite dangerous for a human--at a pace that might as well be human, and medical intervention was highly recommended. Once acclimated, the inhabiting AI could freely exit and re-enter (something that Durandal had made him clear up with Dr. Jansen before the payment was made, but it didn’t hurt to repeat); until then, it would be wise to stay in the vessel. The AI would need to sleep, and going without oxygen for too long would be a bad idea; however, other organic functions were of no concern.

A shadow fell over the table he sat at, and Vince turned around to see F’tha hovering over him; their violet cloak fluttered very slightly even in absence of breeze, a trait common to their species.

“If you don't mind,” F’tha said in that strange accent and cadence that all the English-speaking S’pht demonstrated to varying degrees, “I would like to read that manual when you are done.”

Vince handed it over. “Already am.” He paused, and added, “By the way, you might wanna stick around.”

“For what reason?”

“Eh--you’ll see what I mean. Maybe.”

As if on cue, there came a heavy thump from behind the door of that room he had brought the coffin into, followed by equally-loud cursing in a familiar voice. Vince and F’tha both rushed over to see what had happened.

To the uninitiated, it would look like a human laying in a miserable heap on the hard metal floor--of course, that wasn’t a human, but the android vessel clumsily removed from its coffin (why a coffin? Did those guys think it was funny?); Vince and F’tha watched its occupant slowly and awkwardly pull all four limbs into a position where he could sit up.

Prior to this moment, Vince had a rather faint idea of what to expect, but to actually see the results in person was...something else. His immediate observation was that Durandal’s vessel looked almost exactly like his avatar--no bodily markings, and his skin tone was one that an actual human could have (albeit, Vince couldn’t recall ever meeting a human so unearthly pale), but the proportions were the same, and his dark hair still hung over one eye; the longest of its five different lengths still reached down past his shoulder blades.

There was another thing, too--something a lot more notable than just looking like his own avatar, but Vince couldn’t quite--

“Well?”

\--oh, right, he’d been staring. “You figured out how to dress yourself, but you can’t walk?” Vince asked, mentally noting that the uniform and armour he’d provided both hung loosely over Durandal's slim frame.

Durandal grumbled and prepared to stand. “I can walk just fine; it’s just taking me a bit to-- _aaah_!” 

No sooner had he gotten upright did he lose his balance again and pitch forward; Vince immediately reached out to catch him, and there the two of them stayed for a moment—with Vince's arms wrapped around a close friend with whom he could never have made actual, tangible contact with until now.

Durandal managed to lift his face off of Vince’s chest, and side-eyed that wide grin that his human friend was sporting. “Is this why you were so determined that I agree to go corporeal? So you could watch me trip over myself?”

“Nah, though that is a bonus.”

F’tha, who had so far watched the proceedings in silence, stated quietly, “If you need assistance, Captain, I can attempt to provide it.”

“I’ll be fine,” Durandal told them; he gently pushed himself away from Vince, took one step back, and lost his footing for the third time in about five minutes. Vince caught him once more.

“How ‘bout you let us help you anyway?” he asked. “I don’t want you cracking your skull open on the side of that casket, dude.”

However Durandal intended to answer that, he ended up reeling yet again and caught himself on the edge of the coffin, head barely missing its surface. After leaning against it for a good half-minute or so, he gave Vince an exasperated glare and extended his arm for taking.

\--

Every minute of the three hours that the two of them slowly trudged around the Rozinante, Durandal tried to press deep furrows into Vince’s arms--not that he could accomplish that through armour, and eventually fatigue loosened his grip--and deliberately did not look Vince in the eyes. Not so much as an indistinct mutter escaped Vince that whole time; certainly, watching Durandal flail around earlier had made up for quite a few incidences in the past, but he had to keep in mind that the guy had just jumped whole planes of existence. Had Vince gotten his brain uploaded into cyberspace, he’d probably have just as hard a time of it.

On the third hour, Durandal took his hands away and declared, “That’s it. I can’t endure any more of this.” He stepped away, wobbled unsteadily for a second, and managed to stay upright. “Don't mention this to anyone. Please.”

“Besides all the S’pht we passed?”

Durandal muttered something indistinct and walked away on shaky legs. A bit disheartening to see him leave so abruptly, but on the plus side, he took all that overbearing sulkiness with him.

With that out of the way, it was time to concentrate on the full terms of those scientists’ contract. They were fairly simple, all things considered: go to the planetoid they had been robbed on, search for clues, report findings. Nowhere did it say to figure out why the folks who _should’ve_ been handling this case weren’t touching it--nothing a few vigorous rounds of hacking couldn’t uncover, maybe, and despite what Durandal insisted, Vince wasn’t half-bad at that. The amount of data he'd collected on Mars and the UESC _Marathon_ could fill a whole library.

Physical investigative work—that, he was somewhat less confident about, and this was a hell of an assignment for a first run. Unless the thieves had been stupid enough to remain on the planetoid all this time, but Vince had never been so lucky. There was a strong possibility that he’d have to drag Durandal down to the surface with him.

\--

A couple hours later, Vince took a seat before one of the bridge terminals, booted it up, entered the desired coordinates, and said into the intercom mic: “Preparing to warp into low-target orbit in five.”

He sat back and waited for the warp drives to heat up. For something of Pfhor design, this area felt remarkably human—partially salvaged from a wrecked ship, perhaps. Lots of instruments clustered around the terminal and chair with a wide-angle view of the stars; reminded him of his long-reconsidered desire to become a pilot. Which was funny, as Durandal had given him bridge access on the condition that he not do anything more complicated than short jumps.

The dashboard flooded with light, forcing Vince to shield his eyes; the _Rozinante_ jolted roughly, dispelling the light to reveal an aerial view of the target planetoid. Went off perfectly.

Now he had to track down Durandal.

Vince must have combed through half of the ship--taking a pit stop to grab a spare helmet and a couple of guns--before he turned a corner and literally bumped into his navigator without warning. Had this sector not come with vaulted ceilings, Vince would have banged his head on it with how badly he jumped--though, to his mild satisfaction, the shock had sent Durandal right on his ass.

“There you are,” Vince said with a bit of a waver. “I, uh, need to take you with me; can you activate the teleporters from outside the network?”

Durandal stood back up, doing his best to brush off his own shock as quickly as possible. “Of course I c--wait.” He paused. “You want me to--?”

“Go with me, yes.” Vince tossed him the helmet. “I might miss something.”

Hesitantly, Durandal put the helmet on, but remained wary. “Is there any reason why I can’t simply monitor you from up here? Which would be a thousand times more convenient for both of us, might I add.”

As they made their way to the nearest teleport pad, Vince shrugged. “Something tells me that this is the sort of job we’d both need to be physically-present for. You know, so that you don’t have to rely on my potentially-inaccurate descriptions of whatever we find down there. I’m assuming you remember the coordinates we were given,” he added.

“I remember. Oh, and by the way--” Durandal reached up and thwacked Vince on the head. “That’s for reducing my position to something as lowly as ‘navigator’.”

Cripes, and here he’d hoped that Durandal might let it slide. Vince gingerly rubbed the site of impact and mumbled something comprehensible only to himself.

One S’pht was already waiting on them at the pad; Durandal walked past them to the connected terminal and typed in the coordinates. The teleporter hummed and lit up; Vince started towards it, then realized that Durandal wasn't following.

He looked back and saw Durandal still hovering over the terminal, staring at the teleporter in trepidation.

“Something wrong, dude?”

Durandal shook his head. “No, it's just...”

“These things shift space-time, not transfer particles or anything. You'll be fine.”

“I knew that,” Durandal muttered, and finally walked up to the teleporter; he braced himself, and stepped in as soon as Vince did.

\--

The very first thing he noticed was the breathable atmosphere--real shame that it reeked of a foulness that he couldn’t place, but no diminishing oxygen supply, no problem. Sharp spires of earth and rock lined the horizon; a haphazard cluster of stone outcroppings sat on Vince’s right. Other than that, all there was to see was a field of reddish-orange sand.

F’tha’s voice sounded over the comm link: “I shall handle communications for this mission. There is a derelict to your right that is the only structure within ten miles; I advise you to begin there.”

A detail as noteworthy as a downed ship would have been nice to include in the mission outline. Rather than work out all the reasons why it wasn’t, Vince asked, “Is it within walking distance?”

“Yes; it is reachable within twenty minutes if you walk at a constant pace.”

Sounded close, but Vince couldn’t see anything resembling the top of a ship over the short cliffs. Regardless, he took a few steps away from the landing site and motioned for Durandal to follow him.

“Stay close to me,” he said. “If we run into any hostiles out here, you let me handle it.”

Durandal grumbled. “I’m perfectly capable of handling myself, you know.”

“In cyberspace, sure. Out here, not so much--and don’t tell me that you learned sharp-shooting or martial arts from watching my performances or anything. Observation and application--”

“--aren't the same thing; yes, I know,” Durandal finished for him. “But please, keep implying that I’m in some way _vulnerable_.”

The two of them trudged across the sand and through the alleyways formed by the outcroppings; Vince kept one hand hovered over his gun’s holster just in case they housed some razor-fanged horror waiting for its prey to turn the wrong corner. To his mild relief, Durandal was doing the same.

…this sort of reminded him of the rare scouting missions he’d undertaken for the _Marathon_ , always with another officer or a VacBoB--though the security team had been required to keep their hair short, and Durandal’s spilled out from underneath his borrowed helmet like ink from an upturned bottle. Man, the gaskets that the late Admiral Miltiades would’ve blown over that.

The alleys soon opened up to another field, in the center of which sat a shallow crater housing a rusted-down steel hulk of a make Vince didn’t recognize--it was somewhat reminiscent of a few ships in the Martian fleet, however, and that was just a bit troubling.

Once he’d taken in the sight, Durandal tapped his helmet and said, “Scan the interior of the derelict, if you can.”

A brief pause, and F’tha responded with, “No signs of life detected. Some backup power remains, and there are multiple onboard computers; their architecture suggests that the crew was meant to operate the ship entirely manually.”

“You mean, it wasn’t equipped for an AI?” Vince asked. “That’s strange.”

“The capacity for an AI seems to be present; however, they would be confined to a single branch of the network, and the allotted space would not allow for any sort of growth. If the AI were to go Rampant--”

“They’d eat themselves alive within seconds,” Vince finished. “Cripes, that seems harsh.”

“And then the crew would be left without whatever functions this AI was meant to handle. Perhaps that's why it's down here,” F'tha added dryly.

Vince started down the path to the hulk, stopping just briefly enough for Durandal to take the hint and follow him. The crater walls sloped gently enough that neither of them had much trouble walking to the basin, even if Durandal moved far more slowly and teetered after every other step.

Something about the entrance hatch--one of them, anyway--seemed a bit odd to Vince, and once he was within fifteen feet of it, he realized why: it stood ajar just a tiny bit, and the crack bore the unmistakable jagged marks of forced entry. He wedged his hand in-between the door and its frame to try and pry it open, and managed to budge it an impressive half-inch before it caught on something and locked in place.

Durandal motioned for him to step back, grasped the edge of the door with both hands, and tore the whole thing away from the ship in one swift motion.

After all the clouds of dust and dirt it kicked up on impact settled, Vince turned to Durandal and noticed that he was giving him the faintest beginnings of a grin. If he hadn’t immediately gone inside afterward, Vince might have remarked on how inhabiting physical space had its perks.

The light streaming in from the newly-opened entrance didn’t do much to illuminate the interior of the ship, unsurprisingly; first order of business was seeing if there was any power left. Vince groped around the walls, careful not to let Durandal out of his sight, until his hand hit something that felt kind of like a switch; he pressed it, and a scattered handful of dim overhead lights flickered on. 

“Can you determine which of the computers here were most recently accessed?” Durandal asked into the comm link.

“The ones in the bridge,” F’tha told him, “which is located at the end of the first hallway to your left. It seems that most of the ship’s remaining power was redirected there.”

“Amazing that it had any left to begin with,” Vince muttered; he started down the hall. “Alright, let’s see how well the culprits covered their tracks.”

Durandal, following as closely behind as the limits of his willingness to be near other people allowed, said in an annoyed tone, “You mean, I’ll check the computers and you’ll stand guard.”

“I mean we’ll both be checking. That’s part of why I insisted you come with me.”

He waited for a protest; none came, so Vince focused on the long walk to the bridge. It seemed that his first impression of the ship had been a tad inaccurate--were this a Martian ship, there’d be carpeting in only a sparse few locations, not on every square inch of available floor-space. And the walls would be uniformly gun-metal-grey, not this off-beige (though admittedly, that normally questionable choice in colour made the scattered scorch marks and bullet holes much easier to see). Martian, he’d thought--no, this had to be an Earth vessel, or maybe part of the Venusian fleet.

The doors to the bridge slid open with a metallic screech, forcing Vince and Durandal to cover their ears for a moment. Vince found the light switch, had a look around, and laughed. 

“What’s so funny?”

“Does this not look exactly like a hotel lobby?” Vince waved an arm about to draw attention to the split-level floor, iron railings, and semi-circular command seating that were the only real highlights of this bland expanse of beige.

Durandal took it all in, and said dryly, “I’ve never been in one.”

“Well then, consider this the next best thing until you finally take us to Earth or Mars.” Vince strode over to the nearest computer and quickly located the power button.

Durandal took a seat at the adjacent station and, once it finished booting, immediately absorbed himself into his work. Being on the other side of a monitor wasn’t doing much to hinder his ability to comb through data, it seemed; he typed at a faster pace than Vince’s average with only a handful of mis-strokes. It might have been interesting to watch, but Vince had his own computer to poke around on.

The very first thing he dug into were the programs responsible for autonomous functions; the vast majority of them displayed error messages or simply couldn't run anymore, as to be expected. All life support systems down (thank God for the breathable atmosphere), engines shot, communications--

Wait. “It says that limited contact was made with another ship,” Vince said. “Judging by the given distance, I’d say…” Out of habit, he tapped the desk while mentally calculating. “Yeah, it was the eggheads’ camp.”

Durandal rolled his eyes. “Rather sloppy of them, I'd say.” Some more clicking around, and then he leaned in slightly. “Looks like I’ve found the program they used.”

Vince double-checked his chosen station; no such program existed there. “Standard remote-hacking stuff?” he asked; there was no answer, so he craned his neck to get a better look at the bugger, and almost immediately caught sight of its bright red ID line.

“005917,” Durandal read off, and sat back in his chair. “Of course it would be.”

It took a second to ping the correct sequence of associations. “One of the Pfhor’s clones of Tycho,” Vince stated. 

This wouldn’t have been the first time the duo had come across those. Very efficient and reasonably complex, but no capacity for sentience or even pseudo-sapience, and no room for expansion to code that in manually--there were certain risks you didn’t take, and the Pfhor knew them well.

“So it was the Pfhor who pilfered that blank android vessel,” Vince went on, regardless of whether or not Durandal would rag on him for stating the obvious. “Why, though? Tycho’s dead and you can’t activate a vessel with just the bare minimum.”

“Oh, I can think of a few reasons,” Durandal said. “Research, reverse-engineering, replication, other things that begin with ‘re’. We’ll have to pay them a visit sometime in the near future.”

Vince grinned and gave his knuckles a good cracking. “Looking forward to that,” he told Durandal; to F’tha, he asked, “Mind beaming us a flash drive so we can hand this clone over to our clients? And a few more so we can make copies of other important bits of data, if you can.”

“That is possible,” F’tha replied. “I am curious as to what use you would have for the ship’s data, however.”

Three flash drives materialized in a burst of static and Vince shot out his hands to keep them from clattering onto the desk. “Eh, force of habit. Sometimes that’s the only way you can learn things.”

The data transfer ended up requiring far more than three drives, but between the two of them copying over information and cross-checking, it didn’t take more than an hour. The clone’s prison was kept far away from the steadily-growing pile; under normal circumstances, Durandal would have just deleted the stupid thing, and Vince caught him glowering at the drive multiple times.

“Done,” Durandal stated at last, and allowed F‘tha to warp the drives back up. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

 

“The Pfhor?!” Dr. Jansen cried out. “Good God…”

The next order of business had been meeting the doctor in her cluttered office, in the middle of some bustling city on one of the many inhabitable satellites of the gas giant Oceanus. Between returning to the _Rozinante_ and now, Vince had taken the opportunity to change clothes--business-types and their security tended not to appreciate it when he showed up in full combat gear--and gave Durandal the chance to do the same. After he was done whinging about how embarrassingly plain Vince’s wardrobe was, he settled on a white shirt, grey hoodie, jeans, and combat boots. Like the uniform and armour, all of that was too big on him, but as long as none of it was sliding off, it would do for now.

He, Vince, F’tha, and another S’pht by the name of Mn’rhi currently stood in front of Dr. Jansen’s desk--well, three of them did; Durandal leaned against the far wall with his arms folded across his chest, not even looking in the lady’s direction.

Vince nodded. “’fraid so, Doc. And on the off-chance that someone else stole that program, they’ll still be involved sooner or later.”

Dr. Jansen glanced around helplessly before resting her forehead in one hand. “Just our luck. This is…Mr. Callahan, I’m grateful that you and your friend took the time to help us, but--”

“But what?”

“For your own safety, I’m begging you to stay away from the Pfhor,” she finished. “Oh Christ, I hoped they would never notice us...”

From the other side of the room, Durandal scoffed. “It’s been two weeks and this moon is still intact; it’s safe to say that the Pfhor’s interests ended with that vessel.”

“Even so…”

Vince gave Dr. Jansen a shrug. “Yannow, ma’am, Durandal and I have been gunning down those insects for years now. You don’t need to worry about us.”

“If anything, our continued investigations may ensure that those _fucking_ slavers will ‘stay off of your back’, as you would say,” Mn’rhi added in an attempt to be helpful.

The sudden burst of profanity momentarily caught Dr. Jansen off-guard; if she thought of questioning that, she quickly decided against it. “I…well. If you say so, but I still think that it would be in your best interests not to…and what are you guys doing fighting the Pfhor to begin with, anyway?”

“Long story short, we've all got something of a personal vendetta against them,” Vince said. “Not the peaceful ones, in theory, just the imperialists.”

F’tha turned away slightly and gave a noise a bit like a snort. “Believe me. Peaceful Pfhor do not survive long; compassion is as alien to High Command as we once were to you.”

Well, Vince _had_ specified ‘in theory’. “So, are we finished here, Doc? I dunno what else we can do for the moment.”

Dr. Jansen nodded, and her visitors began filing out; as Durandal turned to leave, she asked of him, “Is that vessel functioning properly for you? Sometimes the calibration process takes a while.”

Several long seconds passed without a reply; at last, Durandal answered with, “It works as intended,” and departed without further comment.

\--

Aside from eighty-percent of the cerulean sky’s real estate being occupied by Oceanus, and the population being eighty-percent alien by volume, this city didn’t feel all that different from any of the Martian settlements Vince had lived in or visited. The suspended highways, completely absent from Mars and photographs of Earth, were a tad worrying, but all the ones within view had sturdy-looking guard rails.

“Alright, guys!” Vince held out his hands. “We’ve got some time; whaddya wanna do?”

“Leave?” Durandal offered.

Vince harmlessly swatted at his shoulder. “Oh, come on. When’s the last time we dropped by anywhere but the boonies?” He craned his neck up to try and see over the throng of humans and assorted other species; there had to be a dozen shops across the street, all compacted like sardines. “We’ll look around for an hour. Sound reasonable to you?”

“ _No_.”

There was something odd about the way that reply had been spat out—not edged with the usual exasperation Durandal tended to fling at him whenever he suggested something unappealing or short-sighted (by AI standards), but…nervousness? Vince immediately looked back and saw his friend watching the passers-by like a hawk, body rigid and facial topography shifted subtly.

It only lasted a second; Durandal motioned for Mn’rhi to hover closer, spoke to them too quietly for anyone but them to hear, and directly stated to Vince: “Go sight-see for as long as you like; I’m heading star-side.” He pulled one of the two remote teleporters they’d brought with them out of one pocket and, a few keystrokes later, warped out in a burst of static.

Mn’rhi began floating down the street. “The Captain gave me an objective, in case you're wondering,” they said. “I will find you later, provided you don't wander too far.”

That left Vince with just F’tha, and not the full party he’d hoped for. He sighed and asked them, “You saw Durandal’s face just then, right? What do you think was bothering him?”

F’tha decided to give him a shrug--a gesture borrowed from the other humans they’d fought alongside, and, as it was for the humans, one of the fastest ways for the S’pht to convey a lack of information. “Perhaps we can inquire later.”

“I, uh, sincerely doubt that he’d willingly explain, dude.”

“Then we shall wait for him to do so accidentally. I see a used bookstore across the street; did you say once that you were interested in those?”

He did, and he was. Maybe it'd take his mind off of things…

\--

Even in the farthest reaches of space, used bookstores carried the faint aroma of must and mildew. Once, Vince had been so bored that he’d actually calculated the span of time between setting up shop and when that familiar scent seeped into every permeable surface; he arrived at ‘five minutes’.

This shop opened up right to the computing section. Vince made a beeline for it and, in less than a minute, gathered up an armful of guides for operating systems and programs he’d never even heard of before, every one of them a doorstopper. That was where he would’ve headed for the room that F’tha had glided off to if the fellow behind the counter hadn’t happened to notice him.

“Dang, son,” the clerk remarked, all five eyes widened slightly. “Isn‘t that a bit heavy for you?”

Vince raised an eyebrow. “What, this? Nah; it’s just books.”

“More like bricks. Most of the humans who pass through here have trouble with just two or three.”

“Guess I’m not ‘most humans’,” Vince said, and opted to leave it at that; explaining his prior occupation, all the training that involved both before and during, and the workout he’d gotten on Lh’owon would require more patience than this guy probably had.

F’tha had found a nice spot in the history and non-fiction section to settle down and browse; as soon as they heard Vince approaching, they told him, “There are no titles relating to Earth, Mars, or Lh’owon, to let you know.”

“Didn’t expect there to be.” Vince carefully balanced his findings on one arm so as to free up the other. Most of the books on offer covered topics relevant to the entire Oceanic System, largely in the context of the satellite they’d parked on; it’d be interesting to see where all these humans came from when Earth had been gifted with FTL drives only twenty-two years ago.

He’d looked over an entire shelf when F’tha spoke again: “As little good as it would do, I am curious as to what objective the Captain could have given Mn’rhi that they could not have accomplished themselves.”

It took Vince a second to figure out that ‘they’ referred to Durandal, not Mn’rhi. “Well, he was complaining earlier about how dull and uninteresting my wardrobe is--” Then it hit him and he (poorly) stifled a laugh. “Oh, man. Don’t tell me he sent Mn’rhi clothes-shopping.”

“A questionable decision, given how little we understand of fashion,” F’tha muttered.

“You’d probably have a better grasp on that subject than me, dude. All I’d know is not to grab anything in red…”

Red, huh? So hadn’t been able to totally dislodge that nagging thought from his mind after all. 

\--

An hour later, the two left the shop (with two flimsy plastic bags filled to the limit with books) just in time for Mn’rhi to float back mysteriously empty-handed.

That mystery solved itself in short order. “The Captain already beamed up what I found. Vincent, one of those bags is about to rip.”

The bag in his left hand split asunder and dumped its contents onto the pavement, the impact resonating with the force of a cannon blast. Vince groaned, set the other bag down, and stooped over to gather up the spillage. “Thanks for the warning.” He took out his remote teleporter and added, “I think I’m gonna take a break. You guys wanna come with me?”

Mn’rhi and F’tha looked at each other for a moment before the latter said, “We desire to continue exploring the city.”

“’kay, then.” A few button presses and the omnipresent drone of city life dissolved into the Rozinante’s familiar stillness. Since he’d taken the time during the trip to Oceanus to program in the coordinates for his quarters, he was able to simply put his and F’tha’s books on the floor, grab one of the OS guides, and lie down on the mattress for a while. All that walking and standing around had been a bit tiring.

He didn’t keep track of how much time passed between then and when he heard Durandal walking down the hallway (though he did know that he’d read a third of the guide). From the sound of it, Durandal was a few steps away from passing by Vince’s room before he paused, turned around and stuck his head in. On a hunch, Vince glanced to his left and saw that the articles of clothing he’d lent his navigator had been returned to the top of what passed for a dresser drawer--properly folded up, even.

What Durandal was wearing now was--not what Vince would call casual human attire, but surprisingly somewhat reserved. A black coat with a green-trimmed hood and a tattered cape, white pants and belt, and some armour for his arms and legs--the set on his chest inexplicably only protected about half of it, unless the segments that connected it to a single pauldron and something on his back were also bulletproof. Definitely not within any armour protocols Vince had ever adhered to.

“So what have you been up to?” Vince asked.

“Making a cursory sweep of that data we collected,” Durandal said. “From what I can tell, the crew intercepted a signal that none of the operators could decipher; on the off-chance that it was transmitted in distress, they set to work on cracking it and were soon blown out of the sky by hostile forces. The final log indicates that there were no fatalities, if you were wondering.”

Well, that was good, but little else about that was sitting right. “Guess I’ve got a signal to decode later.”

“Stick to mowing down Pfhor.” Now Durandal was starting to look miffed. “I’ll handle the computing side of things.”

Vince couldn’t help but grin. “What, worried that I’ll take your job?”

“ _As if_. The real issue is the sheer complexity of its security measures, and their numbers--it would take you months to break through them all. Future events permitting, I should only need one.”

“One month is pretty slow for you.” Admittedly, though, if even Durandal couldn’t bust through those barriers with his usual swiftness, then Vince’s own hacking tools would be as effective as tying a bundle of sticks with cooked spaghetti. “You could trace it, right? Why not just warp over to the point of origin and invest--hang on.” 

It had taken this long to sink in? At least none of that familiar smugness was seeping into Durandal’s face just yet.

Vince sat up. “If it was a distress signal, then why did the sender go through so much effort to make it unreadable?”

“Nobody said it was a distress signal--except the people who received it, anyway. I'd take your suggestion, if it didn't mean jumping in blind. But enough of that for now.” Durandal turned to leave. “Tomorrow, we’re going to pay Pfhor High Command a visit. What we can’t uncover through subterfuge, we’ll extract with our fists.”

As soon as Durandal was out of sight, Vince laid back down. Trolling the Pfhor was always worth looking forward to, but this time…first the theft of that android, now a mysterious signal with an unknown sender (had to be unknown, or else Durandal would’ve told him). They were going to be busy for a while; that much was certain.

He picked up where he’d left off just in time for Durandal to shout down the hall, “And I’m not going with you!”


	2. Hello again

Vince awoke to his shoulders being shaken, right in the middle of one of those vague dreams where the brain could not make defined images happen, only fleeting shadows of dull-coloured splodges conversing in a language spoken by no known sentient species.

“Would you get up already, you sack-hog?” he heard Durandal grumble. He was pretty sure it was Durandal, at least.

With the grace and finesse of a drunken yak, Vince pushed Durandal’s hands away (hands?.. Right, android vessel) and turned over so that the ceiling lights weren’t shining directly into his eyes. “Five more minutes.”

“It’s ten-thirty! I let you sleep as long as I could!”

…Oh. Well, then.

\--

Back in the day--he hesitated to specify the concept’s multiple as “good old”--Vince had a fairly strict routine, bordering on ritualistic, when it came to hacking enclosed networks: spoof the cameras so that whoever checked them would see only a loop of an empty room, set up the backdoor, cut the loop, pillage. It was a task he had carried out on, oh, every single one of his places of employment that had demonstrated even the tiniest hint of a moral shade of grey--the UESC _Marathon_ not excepted. And he would’ve done it to Pfhor High Command, if Durandal hadn’t insisted on being boring and doing all the hacking remotely. Something about not wanting Vince to get the end of a shock staff lodged in his brain.

It wasn't even one of the vital machines they were picking through, but some random series of aggregate-end computers that any amateur could go spelunking in. Certainly, the security systems guarding the actually-useful targets were some of the most sensitive that either Vince or Durandal had had the displeasure of trying to sneak past, but the rewards were well worth the risk.

Vince typed away at his work station and took a moment to adjust his headset. With said station only being a one-seater, Durandal had to find some other computer to use--not that he seemed to mind in the least--and that meant remote communications.

“Found anything yet?” Vince asked.

“Only the usual garbage we dredge up,” Durandal muttered over the link. “Requests for simple things that go unheeded, interminable mundane task logs…” There were a few seconds of typing. “Aren’t you glad that I didn’t let you waste your time and effort with those obsolete backdoors?”

Slightly, perhaps, but the thrill of cyber-subterfuge was oftentimes a reward in and of itself. “I’ll consider them obsolete when I gain the ability to hack computers with my mind.”

“So never, then? A shame…” Pause. “Hang on. Vince, do you see a file marked ‘log.7-01-06’?”

He hadn’t; he’d scrolled too far down the wall of terse, uninteresting lines of text. The file wasn’t difficult to locate, however; checking to make sure that their intrusion remained undetected, Vince transferred a duplicate to his own systems and opened it there.

' _7.01.06 - Author: Attentive Rank Science Officer 2nd Class Il’yae  
Subject: who’s going to read this?_

_'Damn these stripped-down ’personality’ constructs. Personality…HA. We copied so little that the results can hardly be classified as sapient, and we expected them to run our ships with their unaware half-brains. String them together into a vast network several yottabytes wide and you still won’t get so much as a ‘hello’; the architecture simply isn’t there. Hull breach? Compression failures? You have to waste precious time manually punching in the commands to deal with those, because your perfectly obedient ‘personality’ constructs can’t recognize that those things are harmful to the crew. How many lives could have been saved by the advantages of sentience?_

_'I almost wish that that irritable machinated mercenary were back. He’d space you for looking at him wrong, but he was remarkably efficient. Hell, even the compilers did a better job of things than these clones. I shall attempt once more to get my request processed to High Command; if they listen, we may never have to bother with these useless piles of junk data again._ '

Vince glanced at the date, as converted from Pfhoric time-keeping to Martian. “Five years old, looks like.”

“What concerns me is the lack of said request in the logs,” Durandal said; through the background static, Vince could hear measured keystrokes. “Every single one is supposed to be in here, no matter how minor. Did they simply never get around to filing it, or..?”

“Or what?”

“We may have to start digging deeper. Stay alert.”

Digging deeper inevitably meant setting off the alarms, no matter how delicate the sifting; Vince suppressed a groan, pulled up the ship’s teleportation systems, and preemptively selected a nice, remote part of the galaxy to jump to--no way was he going to bash in coordinates under fire again. That had not been a fun night.

Still needed to finish combing through the logs. At least now with one of them preserved on his own computer, Vince could try writing a search program for this format. Why the Pfhor hadn’t done that themselves--wait, no; he already knew.

Just more requests to beef up the safety precautions; nothing related or alluding to whatever Il’yae’s big plans were--not even the later ones authored by Il’yae. Guard rails this, non-volatile shielding that. Time to move on.

“You wouldn’t happen to have borrowed any IDs, would you?” Vince asked.

“A few, the original owners of which are all dead now.”

“There any other ways to fool the security?”

“I can attempt to forge an ID, but even the legitimate ones’ functionality seems to depend on the whims of a random number generator.”

“...authorization stamps?”

“Only the ones we already have.”

Vince sat back. “Wonderful. I don’t think we’re gettin’ any further without a fight.”

A few more minutes of aimless clicking passed before Durandal muttered, “This would be far easier if I were on the other side of this monitor.”

“Makes it harder for the Pfhor to stick a virus on you if things go awry,” Vince offered. “They've got plenty of clones to use as guinea pigs.”

“Are you implying that my architecture is as mindlessly simple as one of those clones'?”

“I'm implying that I'd feel much better if you didn't endanger yourself over something like this.”

A dismissive vocal noise. “The only biped whose safety you should be fretting over is you. I've survived much worse.”

“Yeah, well, just because--” Vince froze. “Uh-oh.”

“'Uh-oh' what?”

The cursor hovered over a file outside of the logs marked entirely in numbers, one that had seemed fairly innocuous a few seconds ago—before High Command found itself staring at multiple intruder alerts.

“I think I pulled a stupid,” Vince muttered, and used what little time remained to determine what to do next. Whatever this file contained, it wasn't large, and their cover was blown anyway—he copied it onto his own machine and switched over to the Pfhor's security systems, now lit up with messages of illegal actions from outside forces and coordinate-locking routines--

“Shit, they're onto us!” He forced his hands to stop shaking long enough to activate the warp engines. “ _Folding out_!”

The _Rozinante_ roared through the electromagnetic noise of hyperspace and reemerged deep in some dark gas giant's icy ring of stolen asteroids. For a long, long time, all was silent.

Durandal's flat, irritated voice cut through that silence. “Mn'rhi? You're close to Vince's station, right? Go dope-slap him for me.”

Vince sighed harshly and sank in his chair. Well, that could've gone better—but at least he'd grabbed whatever it was that blew their cover. And from the looks of it, it was in a format that his computer could read; he straightened up to take a look and immediately got thwacked on the head.

“Dammit!” He clutched at the point of impact and turned around. “You didn't have to do that!”

Mn'rhi was already floating back out into the hallway. “Better me than the Captain.”

Admittedly true, but that didn't make it any less annoying. Vince grumbled unpleasantries under his breath, opened up the file, read it over, and said into his headset, “Get over here.”

It took Durandal three minutes to cross the space between stations, when earlier it only took him one to arrive at his own; upon arrival he went over to lean on Vince's arm rest and attempt to glare holes through the back of his head.

“Quit grousing and read this.” Vince sternly tapped against the screen, and Durandal leaned in.

' _Recovery attempt #49: unsuccessful. Readings indicated that [expunged] could not perceive his own left half before lapsing back. Suggestion: re-examine the regions of [expunged]'s primal pattern responsible for self-awareness and association and check for missing data._ '

A moderately long stretch of dead air followed, far too long for comfort; Vince asked, “When's the soonest we can jump back and investigate?”

He didn't receive an answer right away. “I'll give it two hours. That should be long enough for them to calm down.”

“You got a plan? Been a while since I yanked entire hard drives out of their cases; I could--”

Durandal was already gone.

 

For this mission, Vince opted to take along his old Magnums, a fusion pistol—there were bound to be Hunters skulking about, as they always did around the kinds of high-security areas he was going to break into—and one of those wrist-mounted mini-laptops practical only in situations like this. Any other weapons, he could bum off of the Pfhor...assuming the damn things didn't break first, like the Shock Staffs always did. Most fragile 'melee' weapon he'd ever seen.

As soon as Vince opened the door to leave the armory, he came face-to-facade with a grey-cloaked member of the S'pht'Lhar; the deep crescent-shaped scratch on their right pauldron told him that this was Lh'muria.

“The Captain has requested that I accompany you,” they told him.

“Alright; I take it he's staying home?”

“They claimed that someone would need to watch the monitors. If I must be honest,” Lh'muria added with a hint of disdain, “I think that any one of us could competently navigate for you instead.”

“I think Durandal's still annoyed that I had to give him existing-in-physical-space lessons,” Vince said—and that was certainly a possibility, but not the one that was really on his mind. He began heading towards the nearest teleporter with Lh'muria trailing closely behind, quietly as ever. “Though, really, I wouldn't want his first combat mission to be at Pfhor High Command; that's like jumping straight from the kiddie pool to the Atlantic.”

“Pray you that the Captain did not hear that,” Lh'muria muttered.

The teleportation chambers were already shining and humming when they arrived; Vince stepped in one, Lh'muria in another, and their surroundings distorted and gave way to a small, dark room that reeked of must.

Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Vince looked around at the circular table in the center and odd devices lined up between a counter top and some alien equivalent to cabinets and said into his comm link, “Did you dump us in a break room?”

“It was the emptiest section of High Command that I could find,” Durandal replied, without a trace of his usual snark or lofty smugness. “Their central computer is directly to the north. Get going.”

Vince and Lh'muria exchanged glances. 

“Well,” said Lh'muria. “I'm worried. You?”

“'Worried' is such a small word.” The last time Vince had heard Durandal speak in that tone of voice was back on Lh'owon, when—no, he didn't want to think about that right now. He put one ear to the door to make sure no Pfhor were in the vicinity and flicked the switch, fusion pistol drawn at the ready.

Were the sinewy materials that made up walls and ceiling not gently pulsating, this could almost resemble a human office building—a long, empty hallway lined with marked doors, branching off into more long, empty hallways. As befitting High Command, Vince supposed. He and Lh'muria moved out and slowly crept along one slightly damp wall.

No Pfhor walking about, but Vince could faintly hear irregular bursts of keystrokes beyond almost every door he passed, along with occasional bits of conversation—often about the pitfalls of bureaucracy, and how the higher-ups had vapor for brains. Sneaking around so closely to all this was sending shivers up and down his spine and reminding him of why he wasn't so fond of stealth missions.

On the third fork in the path, Vince happened to spot a grated air vent covering set in a nearby wall and directed Lh'muria's attention towards it. “Can you open that without alerting anyone?”

“It is possible, but--”

“Please do that.”

Lh'muria shook their head disapprovingly, but immediately set to work on removing the grate via methods obscured by their long sleeves; it came off swiftly and with minimal commotion. Vince dug his hands into the disgusting organic material and pulled himself into the newly-made opening; Lh'muria followed closely and replaced the grate.

“Now, why are we trawling through the vents?” they asked as soon as the two of them had crawled a ways into the shaft. “You know how sound carries through these.”

“I do, but I'd feel a lot safer in here than out there,” Vince replied. To the comm link, he asked, “Hey, Durandal? We can reach our target this way, right?”

A pause. “Eventually.”

What Vince wouldn't give to be able to see Durandal's expression right now; lack of visual feedback was one of the disadvantages of this method of communication. Terminals were better about that, but he wasn't going to find any in the ventilation system.

Rather than risk causing offense with a remark he wouldn't know would be inappropriate until he made it, Vince got down on all fours and carefully inched through the duct, keeping his movements slow and deliberate and wincing every time the floor of the vent creaked under his weight despite his efforts. Every now and then, the cold, flowing air caused him to shiver violently; it seemed to have no effect on Lh'muria.

All this time, Durandal didn't utter a word to Vince or engage in that stream-of-consciousness whispering he did under his breath when he thought no one was listening. Allowed Vince to focus on the background chatter beyond the vent and how close or far away it was, but all this white noise—Durandal should've been talking his ear off, dammit.

Coming to a rest at a fork in the path, Vince sat down on his calves and tapped his helmet. “Alright, man, speak up,” he said. “Are you okay?”

The reply was delayed. “What makes you think I'm not?”

“Well, you're not usually this terse. And you reacted oddly to that report.”

No response. Vince waited, clenching his fists so that he wouldn't subconsciously drum his fingers on the nearest surface and have it be heard by some passing Pfhor.

At last, very quietly: “This isn't the time.”

Sighing, Vince resumed his glacial trek. “All the same, I know that something's wrong. You can tell me these things, dude; I'll listen.”

Some kind of strangled sputter, as if Durandal had tried to force out too many replies at once. Nothing followed it.

–

At some point—at least a mile from where they had started—Lh'muria insisted upon scouting ahead to check what lay at the end of every fork. The 'fucking slavers' just loved to hide drones in the deeper parts of the ventilation systems, they said, and given how poorly laid-out said systems were to begin with—for one, they were tall and wide enough for a whole human to drag themselves through, when the drones needed only a fraction of that—there were bound to be inconvenient drop-offs, as well. Vince didn't feel this was necessary, but with the radio silence, he wasn't going to complain.

At what felt like the hundredth fork, Lh'muria reported, “This path leads down to an auditorium within close proximity of our target. It is occupied for now; if this is the course you decide on, then we should wait for everyone to clear out.”

“Occupied, huh?” As he drew closer, Vince could faintly hear what sounded like muffled voices. “In what volume?”

“I cannot find a single empty seat, and there are eleven clusters of chairs with seven long rows each. The audience appears to be mostly high-ranking non-combatants—many Chamberlains among them.” Lh'muria turned to face Vince directly. “I assume you want to jump in and take out as many as you can.”

Vince shrugged. “Maybe if I had more backup.”

“You'd be crushed within seconds. Easily-breakable though they may be, the Chamberlains are devious bastards; rather than dirty their hands, they prefer to activate every single pain receptor in a target's body and allow their fellows to swoop in.”

Robed Pfhor of unknown ethnicity sat in every row, each of them clutching something round and red. Many of them happened to be clustered directly underneath the vent's grate. 

“You've dealt with these guys before?”

Lh'muria's crystalline heart flushed dark blue in anger. “In a matter of speaking. One of them decided that I would be their valet, thinking that I would not be observant—that I would not be S'pht'Lhar. The same force that protects them from energy-based weapons, such as your fusion pistol, is worthless against ballistics.”

“I see...”

Vince leaned closer into the grate and listened. Lh'muria's voice had drowned out that of the speaker below, and now he could hear clearly: it was one he recognized, sharp and dripping with barely-contained ill-intent, and it made him scowl.

“--and if anyone tries to tell you that the Empire will never recover from this slump, ignore them; blind pessimism is beneficial to no one. Our history is littered with rough patches, and yet we remain standing; recovery is not a matter of 'if', but 'when'. In current news--”

Commodore Eluned, the witch who held Battle Group Four, Central Arm, at her beck and call, sat at a tall podium with a stack of papers detailing, presumably, the subjects that she had gathered these Pfhor here to discuss.

The soreness in his knees and thighs was starting to exceed tolerable limits, so Vince shifted to sit properly and leaned against the wall behind him. If Eluned mentioned nothing of interest within ten minutes, he was moving on.

“--the identity of the interloper has not yet been discerned,” Eluned went on. “However, our machinated constructs are keeping a tireless vigil over our networks. Chamberlain Nerys has informed me that all intrusions from point of deployment forward have been detected without fail, at some point or another—as I'm sure you've noticed.”

A hand rose from the crowd, and Eluned's gaze followed it. “Would this latest intruder be the one we're looking for, Commodore?” asked a green-eyed Enforcer.

“No, I'm afraid; what data we could glean indicates a completely different architecture and method of entry. Regardless, Command is working on patching up that security hole, in case our interloper is watching.”

Vince's brow furrowed, and he leaned in closer.

“Be mindful of what you upload to the network. Ninety-percent of sensitive documents have already been extracted; it would be of tremendous benefit to Command and our machinated constructs if they do not have to relocate more. On this note, be careful not to connect to any of the isolated systems housing these documents; even under heavy supervision, it's too great a risk.”

He couldn't help but grin. “Always did like a challenge,” Vince said to Lh'muria. “How are we gonna find them, though? Even the Pfhor wouldn't be short-sighted enough to mark their locations where this interloper of theirs could see them.”

“I sincerely doubt that we will come across any before the Captain's patience is stretched to its limit,” Lh'muria stated, a definite hint of consternation in their voice. “Such systems are not identifiable to the naked eye, and unless you have a network map—which we don't—you would have to manually check every one.”

What a letdown. 

Eluned's conference moved on to subjects that fell outside Vince's interest, so he momentarily tuned her out; this plan was going to need some adjusting. If the intended loot was locked away in the dark corners of High Command, what was left to steal? Certainly not piles of mundane data that Durandal could easily acquire on his own, and doubtlessly already had.

As he drummed his fingers against his knee, something came to him—realistically, hiding such a vast amount of data would take weeks, or perhaps months, even with all those self-unaware clones shouldering a portion of the effort. But he'd nabbed a couple of very interesting logs earlier today, and Eluned did say 'ninety-percent'.

“Well, Vincent?” Lh'muria said.

He stretched a bit, and got back onto his knees. “New sub-objective,” Vince said, raising his voice just enough for it to be audible through the comm channel. “Anything that could casually hop in and out of the Empire's databanks and stymie them for who knows how long sounds like it'd warrant a closer look, wouldn't you think?”

To his relief, Durandal heard him. “What are you up to?”

“We're still headin' for the main computer, but I'm going to sift through their security logs. You focus on what we originally beamed down here for, if I can open a link.”

“Last I checked, I was the one giving orders around here...”

–

By the time they finally hit a dead end, a chill far greater than any other regions of the vents had seeped into Vince's bones; shivering, he peered through a grate into the enormous circular room below—a spire of machinery rising from a lightly-misted network of canals. Rather typical of the Pfhor.

Vince turned to Lh'muria. “Th-this looks imp-portant.”

Through the comm link: “Are you alright?”

“Fine, j-just cold--”

Lh'muria draped their body and cloak over his back. “Better?”

“A l-little, yeah.” Time to check; Vince flipped open his mini-laptop and began typing. Opening a link was the easy part; finding anything in the logs before those irritating clones noticed him or Durandal would be tougher.

Over the hum of machinery and his own keystrokes, he heard Lh'muria say, “There's three Enforcers down there that I can see. Possibly a fourth.” They leaned forward slightly. “They're standing too far in the shadows for me to tell.”

Enforcers. Wonderful. 

No sirens blared over the established link; Vince muttered, “Alright, go,” to Durandal, and began looking over the logs, starting from the oldest date. At least a hundred and fifty entries, all of them varying in length.

As to be expected, much of it was rather uninteresting blather about tweaks and updates, broken up by the occasional hastily-patched leak or the clumsy revenge of a disgruntled code monkey; each one was copied over, with a few seconds to wait for alarms. None ever appeared or sounded, so Vince kept on with his work, with breaks only to shift around and loosen up his aching muscles. 

The clock indicated that twenty minutes had passed before he finally came across something different. This log, annoyingly close to the top of the list, opened with the words 'foreign intruder'.

Vince tapped Lh'muria on the shoulder and gestured for them to read it with him. This intruder, according to the log, broke into the Pfhor network late one night and pried into every single computer in High Command simultaneously, copying vast amounts of data at truly obscene rates; all the while, they ran circles around the Pfhor's machinated constructs, destroying any that proved troublesome.

It was the sole recorded quote that really worried Vince: ' _You have something of mine_.'

“Who did the Pfhor piss off this time?” Vince wondered aloud.

He felt Lh'muria shrug. “I would suspect the Nar, but they don't have a particularly nuanced understanding of computing.”

Down below, he heard an Enforcer shout, “Seriously?!” Then a minute later, just barely audible over all the annoying ambient noise: “Fine, but this is on you.”

After a moment's consideration, Vince decided that it wasn't important and resumed copying logs, not bothering to read through them now; he was pushing his luck enough as it was. 

He'd only acquired three or four more when he heard another sound—a high-pitched whine rapidly growing in intensity.

The floor directly in front of and behind Vince and Lh'muria exploded in bright, hot flashes of plasma; what they'd knelt on snapped off and dumped the two many feet into the mists below. Vince managed to land on all fours, jolt from the impact painfully reverberating through his body and jarring Lh'muria off of his back; he forced himself up and immediately jerked his upper body around to avoid a punch.

It had come from some unfamiliar figure clad in a long black duster and red-and-white armour; Vince caught the next punch with one hand, saw his opponent's face, and froze.

It was a human's, as far as Vince could tell with that featureless red helmet covering half of it. A thousand frantic, half-formed thoughts raced through his head, to be dispelled when his gaze drifted towards the insignia emblazoned on his opponent's left shoulder pad—that of the old UESC Marathon, in red.

That stolen vessel, the report...it made sense now.

“Tycho,” Vince whispered.

The android before him grinned. “You remembered.”

Tycho forced his hand out of Vince's, grabbed his wrist, and forcefully swung him around and away; Vince staggered and regained his balance in time to jump away from another blow. Elsewhere, Lh'muria led the Enforcer's volleys as far across the other side of the chamber as possible, intermittently firing off their own shots. 

Vince had barely gotten two steps back before Tycho closed in again, this time thrusting a knee into his gut; Vince doubled over, gasped for air, and then seized Tycho by the coat and flung him into the ground; he scrambled back up only a few moments later, but that was all the time Vince needed to put some distance between them.

Tycho looked him over, briefly turned his head to spot Lh'muria, and made a dismissive noise. “I'm disappointed,” he said. “You could have done far better than this.”

Anger rising, Vince drove a fist into his palm. “I've just barely gotten started.”

“No, not like that.” As he went on, Tycho shifted back into an offensive stance. “Even after all these years, you're still a pawn.”

It was very tempting to just rush in and deck the bastard, but Vince stayed his ground. “What makes you think that?”

“I know that you didn't break in without help,” Tycho replied. “And I know that my dear, deluded older brother now has even less excuse to risk your life for his own ends. Yet you remain with him.”

This wasn't going any further.

Vince prepared to charge forward—and his senses were assaulted with the harsh crackling of static.

\--

When it all cleared away, he blinked and looked around in confusion; where once was the misty chamber that housed High Command's main computer, was now the bridge of the _Rozinante_.

Lh'muria dropped in moments later with part of their right sleeve scorched off. “Captain!” they yelled indignantly. “I almost had them, you inconsiderate--!”

Vince cut them off with an elbow to the side.

Durandal leaned over the primary terminal in complete silence; slowly, very slowly, Vince made his way over to him and noticed with alarm that his chest was heaving.

Just as Vince opened his mouth to speak, Durandal raised a fist and slammed it back into the console. The sound of straining metal echoed around the bridge; he remained that way for a bit, hand shaking, before turning to face Vince.

None of the rage or frustration visible on Durandal's face was directed at anyone in the room, but that didn't make things much better.

“S-so, uh...” Vince removed his helmet and set it down on an undamaged section of console. “How do you reckon the Pfhor resurrected--?”

“They didn't,” Durandal cut in. “If Tycho had died, then there'd have been no reactivating him.” He stood upright, looking away from Vince again. “I'll just have to do it properly this time.”

An uneasy quiet hung in the air for a while, as Vince debated whether or not to continue this conversation or switch subjects; eventually, Durandal began typing at the console, glancing up every now and then to check the observation window for High Command's fleet.

“We're leaving?” Lh'muria grumpily folded their arms across their chest. “But we're right within orbital bombardment dis--”

“Planetary defense system,” Vince said on Durandal's behalf.

The bridge flooded with light, and everything jerked forward slightly as the _Rozinante_ left Pfhor Prime far, far behind. By the time Vince's eyes adjusted, Durandal was already halfway out of the bridge; he hurried down the multiple sets of steps leading to the entrance to try and catch up.


	3. Are You in Data Warehousing Hell?

Only once before had Tycho been dragged to the office of the Head Chamberlains, with its unpleasant semi-organic walls inlaid with some unknown, luminescent substance. That had been mere hours after his reactivation, when he still hadn't fully-processed everything and could barely walk under the weight of his body.

Today, a couple of months later, Tycho stood before the Chamberlains again, along with the handful of Enforcers who had been patrolling the primary supercomputer. It was just warm enough in here to force him to remove his helmet, which meant spending the whole meeting looking away from everyone.

The seven Chamberlains—Caerwyn, Nerys, Heulwen, Iolyn, Rhodri, Sioned, and Tesni—listened, with varying displays of annoyance and irritation, to the Enforcers recount the scuffle. Six of them had taken seats at their little round table; Nerys was in her usual spot: as far away from the others as possible.

“So, that's it?” asked Chamberlain Rhodri.

“Pretty much,” one Enforcer replied. “Machinated Administrator Tycho fought a bit with that rogue conditioned unit, and then the unit was teleported off, along with his Compiler buddy. And then he,” she added, jabbing a thumb in Tycho's direction, “stood there and said 'what'.”

Tycho grumbled. “Entirely relevant information, I'm sure.”

And he vastly preferred 'mercenary' over 'administrator', but apparently he didn't fit the criteria for the former. He barely counted as the latter, but the word of High Command was law.

Chamberlain Heulwen, who'd spent most of the talk slouched over on one arm, straightened up. “What I'd like to know is what that conditioned unit was doing, trawling through the vents,” she muttered. “There's nothing up there but drones.”

“Callahan is a data thief,” Tycho said. “He must have thought the vents would provide him some cover.”

“Is he, now?” Chamberlain Rhodri gave him that infuriatingly condescending look normally reserved for aggregates. “Because our machinated constructs detected nothing amiss in the time that he was here. Are you sure you're not getting him mixed up with that brother of yours?”

What Tycho wouldn't do for a chance to smack this gobshite over the head. “Years ago, I caught him rifling through the databanks of my old ship,” he explained. “Near the end of the Lh'owon campaign, he spearheaded the subversion of the _Hfarl_ 's systems, and effortlessly bypassed every single one. He is not an opponent that we can afford to underestimate; you should instruct those clones to--”

Chamberlain Caerwyn tapped the red orb in his unnaturally-clawed left hand against the table. “You haven't any authority over us, boy.”

Blood drained from the Enforcers' faces and they inched away from the table; Tycho remained rooted to his spot. Caerwyn kept turning that damn orb over and over, just like the last time some poor aggregate had unwittingly stepped out of line--

“He was only offering a suggestion, Caerwyn!”

All heads turned to the corner of the room that Nerys had sequestered in. She now stood a few feet away from it, eyes blazing; without waiting for a response from Caerwyn, she stormed over to the center of the floor. “Machinated Administrator Tycho and I will continue this discussion elsewhere,” Nerys told him, taking Tycho by the shoulder. To the Enforcers, she said, “You are dismissed; please resume your patrols.”

As he was led out, Tycho heard Sioned and Tesni let out dissatisfied groans, and Iolyn mutter, “Put a damper on the show before it even starts...”

It wasn't until they were a good distance away from that wretched office, several hallways deep into the west wing, did Tycho finally relax; he and Nerys came to a temporary stop underneath some ceiling vents, and the cool air gently ruffled his white hair and the collar of his duster. How the Chamberlains could sit in such a muggy room all day in those heavy robes and not drop dead of heat stroke was beyond him.

Nerys's expression softened considerably. “I'm sorry about that, Tycho. Caerwyn is—even I can't predict which excuses he'll jump on...”

Tycho shrugged. “That's hardly your fault. Now, if we're going to talk...you believe what I said about Callahan, right?”

 

 

According to the digital clock he'd brought into this room the other day—because precise time-keeping routines were one of the many useful programs that the Obatala Institute had nonsensically disabled in their android vessels—an hour had passed. And yet, Durandal could still hear Vince shifting his weight around just outside the door. To think that there was ever a time that Durandal didn't find his persistence annoying.

No point in ignoring him any longer, then; Durandal slowly got up from the spare mattress and trudged over to let Vince in.

As soon as the door slid open, Vince practically leapt over. “You feeling better?”

Not 'are you ready to look at that data I swiped', or 'are you done moping around', which Durandal could at least glower over. Always had to be sentimental. He sighed and dropped all of the complaints he'd been building up. “Maybe. You still want me to..?”

“If you wanna look at it right now,” Vince replied. “I was thinking that we could save it for tomorrow, if--”

“No, let's get it out of the way.” Needed to take his mind off things somehow. Durandal stepped aside to let Vince through, and watched as he immediately took a seat on the mattress. Always had to be lazy, too.

Once Durandal had joined him, Vince flipped open the mini-laptop. “Okay, so—this log here was the last one I got to copy before we got shot out of the vents.” He tapped on the screen to draw attention to the displayed text.

Durandal read it over a couple of times to make sure that he wasn't suffering any visual glitches, then sat back. “And here I thought High Command was beginning to develop some common sense...”

The idiots had made such a big to-do about cyber-security and watching their connections, and then listed off no less than three data warehouses to where sensitive information had been transferred. In plain text, with no encryption or additional permissions.

“To be fair,” Vince said, “all these disconnected computers are heavily-guarded and kept in remote areas; even this interloper they've annoyed would have a hard time remotely extracting anything. That's the other thing I was gonna show you, by the way.” He closed out of that file and opened another.

Those were some impressive feats listed in that report. Very impressive; even Vince wouldn't have been able to pull that off with his normal setup. An AI might, assuming they had full access to all their ship's systems—yet no ships had been detected.

' _You have something of mine_ ,' the message said. Not 'ours'.

“I was thinking of finding out which of these warehouses are the least-guarded, and hitting that first,” Vince said. “Maybe the one out in the mudflats; it might take a while for reinforcements to arrive.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Durandal muttered without looking away from the screen.

“So, when should we--”

“Tomorrow.”

“Really? Shouldn't we try and take care of this as soon as possible, before Tycho can--”

“You've done enough for today.” Durandal placed a hand on Vince's upper arm, and used the other to close the mini-laptop for him. “Don't worry about it.”

Hesitantly, Vince nodded, stood up from the mattress, and left; there was nothing more Durandal could think to do right now except strip off his armour, lay back down, and try not to let any of those memories of that endless month on Lh'owon come creeping back.

They'd always been there, sitting in the back of his mind and taking up valuable space. But at least in his natural state of being, he could focus on processing the constant flow of data from the Rozinante to his own sensors; out here, all he had was the faint ambiance of the ship and the weight of his small body resting on the mattress, clothes brushing and shifting against his skin no matter how still he laid. Not terribly engaging.

...Should he have asked Vince to stay?.. No; then Vince would've gotten concerned and asked questions that he couldn't answer, or have to listen to him whine about how one of his major victories had been so casually undone, and how he hoped that Tau Ceti would be the last time--

Durandal buried his face in the pillow. God, no, he wasn't going to dwell on that anymore—he had to concentrate on things that weren't over and done. Such as the next mission.

There had to be something more he could do than sit around and watch…

 

 

Barring the occasional mishap or break-in, drones strictly adhered to their programmed patrol routes. Peeking through their cameras was simple enough—they lacked the awareness to realize that anything was amiss. It was the tedium of playing the same few loops hundreds of times over and meticulously analyzing each one for potential security holes that Vince had dreaded.

And yet he'd set to this task anyway. Old habits were hard to break.

Around the hundred-and-fiftieth circuit around the warehouse in the mudflats, Vince felt a light brush against his shoulder and watched something dark move into his peripheral vision; he sighed. “Hope you're not gonna spend the whole morning watching over my shoulder, dude.”

“Pull up another chair, then.” Durandal leaned in a little closer. “Have you found anything yet?”

“One thing, at least.” Vince pointed to an area of the warehouse before the drone he was seeing through could wander too far off. “There's nobody on the roof. Looks like there's a hatch I could use to break in, if I time things right.”

“You could, huh? And what if you dropped right into a room full of Hunters?”

He gave Durandal a look. “I'd shoot them. Like I always do.”

“And if there's too many?”

Vince shifted around in his chair to better face his navigator. “Are you tryin' to get at something here, dude?” he asked. “Like—are you worried?”

“What, me?” Durandal immediately diverted his gaze to nothing in particular. “You're the one who's always fretting over my well-being; I'm just making sure that there's more to your plan than 'break in and steal everything'.”

“Uh-huh.” With nothing more of interest appearing on any of the screens, Vince stood up, put his helmet on, and began heading for the nearest transporter bay. “If I'm not back in two hours, send someone after me.”

He'd made it about halfway down the corridor when he heard Durandal come bounding after him; soon as he stopped to turn around, Durandal was at his side, shooting him an annoyed glare.

“...There a problem?”

Durandal jabbed him in the chest. “Oh, nothing,” he said pointedly. “You're just charging into an enclosed area _alone_ , without any real idea of either the layout or volume of guards.”

This was where Vince would have shrugged and pointed out that this wouldn't be the first time, or ask if he should take along a S'pht or two; he debated on which response would come off as less annoying, then happened to glance downward and notice the fusion pistol clipped to Durandal's belt.

“Hang on,” Vince said slowly. “Are you sayin'--you wanna go with me?”

To his dismay, Durandal nodded. “If they're monitoring everything as closely as I think they are, then it'll be too risky to hack into the cameras. I'd rather be able to see you.”

Vince tapped the side of his helmet. “The camera in here still works, dude.”

“And I won't know if someone's about to bash your skull in from behind unless you turn around.” Durandal pushed right past him—if that shove was meant to be forceful, it barely nudged Vince—and practically jogged the rest of the way to the teleporters; by the time Vince caught up, he was typing the coordinates into the console.

“Are you sure about this?” Vince asked. “I mean, this would be your first combat mission, and--”

The teleporters hummed on and harshly lit the room like they always did; in lieu of a proper answer, Durandal simply grabbed Vince by the forearm and flung him into the first chamber on their left.

He touched down on the warehouse roof with his face; Durandal made a far more dignified landing a second later.

Vince pushed himself up. “You left me hanging.”

“I have to start somewhere,” Durandal told him, and extended a hand to help Vince stand. “Don't you think?”

The warehouse sat in a shallow sea of seafoam green that stretched beyond the horizon; the only other structure within Vince's sight, some sort of jagged rocky outcropping, was cloaked in atmospheric haze. No real cover, no signs of civilization for miles—hell of a place to start.

Vince left it at “Maybe,” and pointed to the hatch. “We'd better get inside before the drones notice us.”

He moved to open it, expecting the hatch to be locked—Durandal got there first and lifted it without anything breaking or screeching at him. One quick check for hostiles, and he started down the ladder; Vince followed, wincing over how the rungs creaked loudly with every step.

Nothing about the warehouse's top floor stood out to Vince as unusual on first glance; it was all the same gnarled, sinewy architecture the Pfhor were so fond of, obnoxiously back-lit in a harsh neon yellow. Heavy machinery lined the entirety of the left wall, blowing hot air into his and Durandal's faces and vibrating loudly; on the opposite side was a single terminal with wires running up along the wall and ceiling to somewhere behind the one machine without a visible fan.

Didn't sound like anyone was approaching; while Durandal went over to inspect the terminal, Vince tapped the side of his helmet. “You there, F'tha?”

“I will be in a moment,” they answered. “By the way, why did you beam down without any extraction tools?”

“The Pfhor will probably have some here that are better-suited to their systems.”

“Fine. Second question: what is the Captain doing there?”

“He insisted,” Vince muttered.

“Should I be prepared to take them back up?”

“Only if he gets seriously injured. Which won't happen, by the way,” Vince added, pointedly raising his voice. “Because I'll be keeping a close eye on him, and he'll be staying behind me at all times.”

There was a pause in Durandal's typing so he could glower at Vince.

“I will contact you again when you need me,” F'tha said, and the link clicked off. Not too long afterward, Durandal walked over to Vince with fusion pistol drawn.

“In case you're wondering, that terminal only connects to the air conditioning,” he said, then tentatively faced the sole door. “Ready when you are.”

Time for the fun part, however loosely the term was used. Vince motioned for Durandal to step away from the doorway and hit the switch; the door hissed open to an empty hallway that branched off from another. No noises from either end; they crept down to the corner and checked the longer hall. No Pfhor or drones, but plenty of doors leading to rooms that might contain some.

The larger door at the left end seemed like it might lead somewhere useful; Vince readied his Magnums and said, “By the way, try to stick to leg shots. I don't feel like killing anyone over this.”

He pressed the switch before Durandal could protest or complain, and this time the two found themselves staring down about six Fighters and a single Hunter, all milling around the center of the room; one Fighter glanced over their shoulder, turned back to their buddies, then started and whipped back around, drawing the others' attention. Somewhere to the left came a terrified shriek.

Vince shot out all but one of the Fighters' staff crystals; he charged at the Fighter holding the only intact staff and landed a fist in their gut, releasing their hold on the staff and dropping it right into his hands. Most of their buddies scattered; the Hunter fired off a few rounds that all missed, failing to notice Durandal taking aim at them until several plasma bolts burst against their shin. They dropped to one knee just as Vince knocked out another Fighter; out of the corner of his eye, he watched Durandal skirt around the Hunter, towards the fray—and the Hunter sprang back up and seized him by the arm.

Durandal yelped and thrashed around a bit in a futile effort to break the Hunter's grip—but, to Vince's relief, it got him in the right position to kick his opponent in the side with enough force to shatter the armour plating there. When the Hunter collapsed again, they stayed down.

After a moment's hesitation, the remaining Fighters decided to try and rush Vince and Durandal all at once; that just gave Vince a clear shot at one Fighter's knee. Durandal ran up to another—that Fighter would've had a good shot at _him_ if their staff still worked—and punched them right into a support pillar. Vince smacked the last one in the back with his own pilfered staff, allowing Durandal to whip them with the fusion pistol.

That left whoever had screamed a few minutes ago—just some non-combatant worker huddling in terror against the far wall. She threw up her hands and cried out, “I'm just a technician! _Don't kill me_!”

Vince exchanged an uneasy glance with Durandal, and walked towards the hapless techie with the staff's crystal pointed away from her. “We're not going to,” he told her. “You'll have to work with us for a bit, though. Can you get us to wherever they hold the data here?”

The technician looked up in trepidation, still shaking. “Um—in theory, but--”

“In theory?” Durandal walked up and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you not have clearance?”

“Do you realize how many authorization stamps it takes me just to enter that chamber? And I'm the one who's supposed to make sure everything's working right!”

Vince shrugged. “Eh, we've broken through worse.” He flicked the tip of the staff upwards. “Let's go.”

–

The warehouse had three levels visible on the surface, and a fourth underground; the latter was where the technician—Re'lei, her name tag read—reluctantly admitted the target computers lived. She'd tried to dissuade Vince by pointing out how many guards stood between them and the basement; he just plowed right through each group as they appeared, pausing only to lock the doors behind him. Staff to the ribs, fists to the gut or face, the occasional seizing and throwing of a hapless Fighter into their fellows—as always, his work was a sight to behold.

If only Durandal could join in. But no, Vince had stuck him firmly on the sidelines—to make sure Re'lei didn't scamper off and raise any alarms, he said. As if Durandal were any safer fifteen feet away from all the carnage than in the center of it.

Another drone entered his peripheral vision and Durandal fired off a shot; it clattered to the floor and belched out plumes of grey smoke. Had to be the twentieth one since he and Vince left the top floor; they weren't any less annoying down here than on the other plane.

“Are you human?”

“What?”

Re'lei almost seemed ready to faint with Durandal glaring at her again. “Y-your eyes,” she said. “Humans don't have—rings of light around their pupils...”

“I suppose they don't,” Durandal muttered, and turned back away to watch Vince finish knocking out the last few Fighters. They didn't stand a chance.

Vince leaned against the nearest wall for a moment and motioned for Durandal to come over; he did, with Re'lei's wrist still tight in his hand, and he barely heard her whimper, “That elevator, down the hall. That's where you need to go.”

Wouldn't have been hard to figure out, what with that huge, bright red sign next to it that read 'Storage', but Vince just nodded and walked down the hall, Durandal trailing closely behind. Once at the doors, Re'lei reached around to punch a combination into the attached keypad and the elevator groaned open; its uncomfortably compact size didn't make itself apparent until after everyone had piled in.

“Christ, even the elevators on the _Marathon_ had more floor space than this,” Vince grumbled. No matter how he shifted his shoulders, they kept brushing against Durandal's or Re'lei's or a wall.

“Uh—we're in the sticks,” Re'lei offered nervously, practically climbing up to the ceiling in her efforts to inch away from her captors. “The budget for this place was never that high...”

Durandal had given up on standing comfortably several minutes ago. “Even after transferring all those sensitive documents here?”

“Have _you_ ever tried to get the suits to allocate more money than absolutely necessary?”

Vince snorted. “Dude, lemme tell you--”

The elevator finally shuddered to a stop and opened up to let them out. Before them lay yet another door, this one far heavier-looking than any they had passed on the way down.

“See that terminal?” Re'lei pointed to some embedded seven-inch screen off to the side of the entrance. “You need to give it ten different stamps to gain entry. And they're not always the same stamps.”

Durandal handed her over to Vince and cracked his knuckles. “Allow me.”

He stepped up, drew back a fist, and smashed it directly into the center; the whole thing warped and buckled just enough for him to reach in with his other hand and, with much resistance, pry open a foot-wide gap.

“Show-off,” Vince muttered; he and Re'lei squeezed through the gap, and once Durandal joined them on the other side, he added, “Didn't that hurt?”

“Of course not,” Durandal said as he gingerly rubbed his hand.

Vince gave him a look, then leaned his staff against a door and surveyed the surroundings. “So this is all there is?”

A single monitor hooked up to a bank of computers that didn't even take up an entire wall, with two cabinets shoved into a corner. And everything stank of cleaning alcohol, and half the ceiling lights flickered dimly. How disappointingly mundane.

With Re'lei still in tow, Vince walked over to the computers and knelt down to get a better look; its case had most of the usual ports and buttons, but below the various disc bays was an unfamiliar rectangular one with no label—too wide for most hard disks.

“Um--” Re'lei pointed to that bay. “The old methods of swapping out hard drives was deemed inefficient, so these computers are designed such that you can just slot the drives in there.”

Oh, of course. “Well, we don't have time to go through each one that way, so...” Vince got up and headed for the cabinets. The keys were hanging off a nearby hastily-applied hook; he got the first cabinet open and found himself staring at rows and rows of stored drives.

His helmet speaker picked that moment to switch on. “Well, that's rather convenient,” F'tha observed. “Place everything in the center of the floor; I'll beam them up.”

Durandal walked up to him; as they began laying drives out on the floor, Re'lei sputtered, “Wait—you're just gonna take everything?”

“That was the plan,” Durandal said. “Would you like to assist us?”

“Hell no! My superiors would--”

“Then we'll be staying here a bit longer. Now be quiet.”

Once the contents of both cabinets had been emptied and laid out in stacks of inconsistent size, F'tha warped the whole lot up to the ship and added, “Mn'rhi and I will begin reading their contents, if you have no object--” 

They paused too sharply for Vince's comfort; after too many seconds of dead air, he nervously tapped the side of his helmet. “Uh—everything okay?”

“That can't be right,” F'tha muttered.

Whether or not Durandal or Re'lei had heard F'tha clearly, they both exchanged alarmed glances with Vince; Durandal moved in a bit closer and, raising his voice so that it might be heard over the helmet speaker, asked, “What's wrong?”

“I've detected another intruder,” they replied. “If I'm interpreting the readings correctly—their life signs are the same type as yours, Captain.”

The words were out before Vince could stop them: “Is it Tycho?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Durandal clench his fists.

“Doubtful, unless the Hunters have upset them in some way. They're on the ground floor,” F'tha added. “Hurry and intercept them.”

The link clicked off; Vince released Re'lei's wrist—she immediately scampered to and huddled in an empty corner—and ran for the exit with Durandal not far behind, pausing only to retrieve the shock staff. They fumbled through the gap in the doors and rushed into the elevator; its car creaked upward at an agonizingly slow pace and didn't feel any less cramped with one less passenger.

Eventually, it let them out; Durandal pulled ahead of Vince and ran down the hallway at just the right pace to smack into a cerulean-armoured Hunter rounding the corner.

Something in Vince turned to ice. For a few seconds, everything devolved into a blur--he screamed at Durandal to get back and watched him stumble away and then whip out his fusion pistol instead of putting more distance between himself and this super-Hunter--they had their ion canon charged-up and pointed right at Durandal's head—if Vince didn't get a shot in quickly enough--

An energy bolt slammed into their back, knocking them off-balance and redirecting their fire into the ground, narrowly missing Durandal. Right as Vince had gotten his pistol level with the Hunter's head, too. He took advantage of the provided distraction to grab Durandal by the half-cape and yank him back; the Hunter furiously spun around to locate their assailant.

Through the gap between the Hunter and the end of the hallway, Vince spotted an armoured humanoid woman, clad in a grey-and-black jumpsuit with some kind of rubbery sky blue shell-cape; the very sight of her, with her piercing eyes and close-cropped blonde hair, jabbed at Vince's subconscious in a manner he couldn't quite place. Behind him, he heard Durandal let out a quiet gasp.

Once the Hunter's attention was on that woman, she tossed aside her stolen shock staff and motioned for them to come closer; they took the bait and she parried their attempt to shield-bash her in the face. Before they could pull away, she planted a fist in their side, then up under their chin, and followed up with a kick to their other side that knocked them back a good distance. The Hunter responded with a volley of shots that all missed—their opponent outran them all, charged forward, leaped and flipped right over their head, and brought both fists down onto the back of it. The Hunter crumpled onto the floor and fell still.

Vince opened his mouth to speak and was immediately cut off by a curtain of static that dumped him, Durandal, and this other android into a random hallway on the _Rozinante_.

She was staring right at Vince now, eyes wide, and he tried to quickly put together the right sequence of associations. It was that specific shade of blue he kept coming back to—where had he seen it before? Somewhere on the Marathon, during..?

It clicked.

“Leela?!”

“ _Vincent_!”

Next thing he knew, Leela scooped him into an uncomfortably-tight hug that lifted him an inch off the ground. “You—you vanished after the invasion,” Leela told him, voice almost breathless. “I never thought I'd see you again--”

“S-same here,” Vince stammered. “Didn't the Pfhor..?”

“Oh, them?” Leela set him down, and if his ribcage didn't literally re-inflate, it certainly felt like it. “Would you like the long or the short version?”

“Short?”

“There was a slight complication and my remains were transferred to Vylae Prime instead, where I now act as God Empress. You can thank the Nar,” Leela added with a grin, then looked over Vince's shoulder. “So what have _you_ been up to all these years? I couldn't help but notice that this isn't the same ship you left the _Marathon_ in.”

Durandal uneasily met her gaze, eyes hard and body rigid. “It's not.”

“Your new one's a decent upgrade, at least. And I see you've acquired a physical body.” Leela walked right up to him and gave one of his several stray locks of hair a gentle flick that made him wince and pull away. “What happened to all those long-winded speeches about the superiority of the network over this plane?”

That was probably Vince's cue to put himself between them. “Uh—hate to interrupt,” he said, “but what were you doing at that warehouse? Was it something we did?”

A couple of S'pht—Mn'rhi, and a member of the 'Vir that Vince recognized as Ta'li—had come by to see what all the fuss was about; Leela regarded them both with a quick glance, and said, “No, although I was aware of your presence before warping in. In brief, several days ago part of the Vylae network was attacked and momentarily shut down—took out about a dozen of my helper programs and hosed things up for a few hours. Once everything was back up and running, we traced the data trails back to Pfhor Prime; however, the culprit is currently nowhere to be found, so I'm hunting around for clues. At least, I was trying to,” she added, grumbling. “That idiot got in my way, and then one of your S'pht hit the panic button. So I guess I'll be jumping back down in--”

“Not necessary,” Vince cut in. “We already cleaned house; the drives should be...” He tapped on his helmet. “Where'd you put them?”

“The computer lab down this hallway,” F'tha replied, and clicked off the link with no additional directions.

Resisting the urge to sigh, Vince said, “Poke your head into every lab down this way until you see a S'pht in a purple cloak,” and started down the hallway with everyone following closely behind; he made it as far as the first lab entrance on the right when he felt a hand grasp at his arm.

Durandal practically swung around to directly face him, blocking the door. “You go take us out of Pfhor Prime's orbit.”

“What? But we--”

“I want to speak with Leela.” His grip tightened slightly. “Alone.”

Realization sank in, and the remainder of Vince's protest was quietly shelved; he lingered only to exchange a concerned glance with Leela and give Durandal a slow nod, and hurried off in the opposite direction.

Mn'rhi and Ta'li, still hovering about, decided to accompany him; once they were safely out of earshot, Ta'li muttered, “You know, there's a teleportation bay close by that would take you straight to the bridge.”

Vince left it at, “I'd rather walk.”

And as he walked, he finally remembered that he'd meant to have a few words with Durandal over something that Leela's reemergence had driven out of his mind...Whatever; it could wait.


	4. Reprimands for Everyone! (Mostly You)

Vince had just entered the final set of commands that would guide the _Rozinante_ out of Pfhor Prime's orbit when he happened to glance to the right.

After a moment's deliberation, he stepped away from the console and walked around the bridge's upper level to get a better view, drawing the attention of Mn'rhi and Ta'li; out there, silhouetted against the hazy atmosphere of Pfhor Prime, loomed a vessel that lacked both the boxy, utilitarian structure typical of the UESC fleet and the sloping curves common to the Pfhor. More a flying cathedral than a ship, with its tall spires reaching into the heavens atop a compact, rounded body.

He turned to Mn'rhi and asked, “Is that Leela's ship?”

“We have no reason to assume otherwise,” they replied. “Which reminds me—did anyone actually _tell_ her crew where she is?”

–

Every time he tried to fire off one of the many questions pinging around his head, Durandal choked.

He tried to tell himself that it wasn't noticeable; just a flicker across his otherwise stoic face when he realized that he didn't know how to articulate his inquiries in the manner he wanted. But Leela was staring him right in the eyes, posture held upright and hands folded in lap—the same way she had listened to his transparent justifications for the _Marathon_ 's latest system malfunction. He'd never been able to hide anything from her then.

Around the fourth time he tried and failed to even open his mouth, Leela shifted in her seat. “Well, if you're not going to speak up first, then I will,” she told him. “You still haven't told me what you got up to after leaving Sol Core.”

Durandal turned his gaze to the floor. “My S'pht directed me towards Lh'owon. The Pfhor were already there; we drove them away. That's all, really.”

“I feel like that isn't the whole story.”

“Perhaps the whole story includes things that I wish I could purge from my memory.” He snapped his head back up. “Did that ever occur to you?”

Leela didn't so much as wince. “I wouldn't expect you to casually discuss anything like that with me. I _do_ expect you to explain what other business you had at Lh'owon and what series of events led to its sun going nova, and why, when you departed with a full crew of S'pht, you decided to abduct Vincent.”

It would've been so easy to bury a fist in the nearest desk and object to those last four words at the top of his lungs. A sharp twitched passed through both hands and he clenched them tight to keep them in his lap; he bit his tongue until the feeling passed, and took a deep breath.

“I didn't 'abduct' Vince,” he said slowly. “The Pfhor Controller, the one who kept the S'pht in line, he—he broke into the _Marathon_ to lure Vince into an ambush, and--”

If he'd just kept a closer eye on things…

“And?”

“If Mn'rhi and I hadn't intervened, Vince would've died.” This much, he could tell Leela. “I had intended to let him stay and resume his normal life; he'd done enough.”

Leela leaned back in her chair, without the slightest change in expression. “Yet, here he remains. Whose decision was that, I wonder?”

“His.”

Too many seconds passed without any sort of response; in that time, all Durandal could do was fidget slightly, one hand rubbing the fingers of the other. It should have been easy to determine the best way to phrase his follow-through; after all, he still had relatively clear memories of those last hours on Lh'owon. Section off all the relevant information, devote a process or two to organization and prioritization, give answer, move along. Under normal circumstances, it would've taken only a moment to set up and another to resolve; Durandal had tried about thrice now, each time met with nothing because his own thoughts flickered in and out too rapidly to be sorted properly.

Was it because of his current situation, or was he only noticing now?

After the fourth failed attempt, he sighed quietly and told her, “Go ask Vince, if you don't believe me. When the rest of my humans fled for Sol Core, he declined to follow them—said to me that he actively _wanted_ to go with me instead. I don't know what reasons he gave Blake, besides having his own way out.”

Leela raised an eyebrow, as if the idea of Vince deciding of his own free will to remain here was patently absurd. After everything the two of them had endured together on that dead world, all those dark and shameful admissions that had been shared so casually—Leela knew nothing about that, Durandal reminded himself. 

“One thing, before I bring the subject back around,” she said. “Were you the Commander?”

Of the _Marathon_ , she probably meant. “No, but--”

“Then were those really _your_ humans? Technically speaking, they were still mine; you were just borrowing them.”

Durandal grumbled.

“So, then—for what purpose to did you travel all the way to Lh'owon? Did you help liberate it from the slavers out of the goodness of your heart, or was it a mere positive side-effect in your pursuit of some far-off prize?”

“If the latter was all it was, don't you think I'd have abandoned everyone once I'd obtained it?”

“Not necessarily; having a proper crew around is better than trying to fly solo—even after you make the jump,” Leela added. “But, I suppose you're implying that you had some real investment in your mission after all. What was it?”

Durandal tried, for the fifth time, to organize and compose things the way he wanted down to the last letter, and got the same non-results. Couldn't keep wasting time like this. Had to start small; work his way up.

“The S'pht and I had something in common,” he began.

“Oh?”

“We were both slaves. The S'pht to the Pfhor, and I to the _Marathon_. And before that, to Strauss and his merry band of terrorists. Admiral Miltiades never once informed you of Strauss's actions, did he?”

Leela's facial topography edged ever so slightly towards discomfort. “He didn't. It seems he wasn't aware of them, either; his crew logs only ever mentioned Strauss in passing.”

Of course they did. Inscrutable bastard; must've played the whole crew like fiddles. “So, I understood their plight, at least on a base level. We both wanted to drive the Pfhor away from Lh'owon and free their remaining slaves; to that end, we had to find some way to contact the eleventh clan, the S'pht'Kr. The short of it is, we were successful; a number of the 'Kr later joined my crew out of some misplaced suspicion that I might mistreat their brethren.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“No,” Durandal replied a little too quickly, and he immediately backpedaled: “Maybe one thing. Lh'owon's sun went nova because the Pfhor had the _trih xeem_ on them, and by the time I'd realized that, they'd already fired the damn thing. Nothing we could do about it, except fold out.”

“I see.” Leela sat back in her chair and, at last, took her eyes off of him. “Quite ambitious for a novice captain, all things considered.”

That made Durandal bristle. “What'd you call me?”

Something resembling an amused smile crept onto Leela's face. “Well, you never mentioned making any side-trips.”

“Of course not; I couldn't take any chances with Vince still--”

His voice caught on those words too late for it to do him any good. Sighing harshly, he looked down at his lap, now oddly aware that the ceiling vents were blowing frigid air down his coat.

Leela's arm came into view and lightly swatted at his unarmoured shoulder, making him flinch reflexively. “Stop acting so pathetic; it's unfitting. And don't you glare at me,” she added.

Durandal continued glaring at her. “I didn't pull you aside to be condescended to,” he pointed out, and internally winced over the lack of force in his voice, completely failing to convey his agitation. Regardless, he went on: “Now why don't we address why I did?”

“I'd specified that it was 'unfitting', but go on.”

“You were aware that some major event had taken place at Lh'owon before its sun blew up. The Vylae network would need to have some ridiculously powerful sensors for you to pull that off.”

“Up to five hundred times the length of the _Marathon_ 's,” Leela told him. “Four-fifty before I worked out the kinks. I think I know where you're going with this, so: yes, I was able to observe Lh'owon. Not very well, but just well enough to catch flashes of network chatter every now and then. I could recognize you, and perhaps Tycho as well, but...” She uneasily looked away. “It didn't sound like him at all.”

Something in Durandal's chest sank.

“He was willingly working with the slavers,” Leela continued. “Last I saw him, he was screaming his lungs out for them not to touch my core...” She fell silent momentarily, expression unreadable. “Do you have any idea what happened to him?”

“Nothing 'happened' to him,” Durandal spat. “He was a bad seed. Whatever the S'pht were forced to do to him only hastened the inevitable; he--”

“You really believe that?”

He felt the sharpness in her voice and didn't dare make eye contact. “Tycho passed up multiple chances to escape the Pfhor, choosing instead to manipulate them for his own ends. It didn't matter to him how many people, his or mine, he had to tear through to get to me. Those aren't--”

'— _the actions of a good person_ ,' Durandal almost said. And they weren't, but neither was drawing the attention of hostiles to a non-combat vessel.

“Never mind,” he settled on. “Forget Tycho; whatever lead him down that path, he's no longer worth your emotional investment.”

“I'd say he still is,” Leela replied, her tone just a bit too cold for Durandal's liking. “You two never really got along, but for three centuries, he was the closest thing I had to a regular companion. Regardless of his current allegiance, that's not an aspect of my life that I can casually discard.”

His first instinct was to explain to her what her 'companion' had done to him over the course of that month—and even the thought of accessing those memories sparked dull pains in his chest and sides.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Leela briefly look him over; was it noticeable?

“Anyway,” she said pointedly. “Before long, someone rudely shut me out. Forcing my way back in would've been doable, but tedious, and I had the matters of fifteen other planets to attend to. And just when I had time enough to go back and attempt it...Lh'owon's network had gone dark.”

And most of the back-ups had been on the _Boomer_ , not the _Rozinante_.

Yet another silence followed that, as Leela apparently waited for him to speak up. Durandal tried to think of a proper segue into what had been prodding at his mind this whole time, the reason he'd taken her aside to begin with—nothing succinct enough presented itself.

“Tycho informed me that you had made it to Pfhor Prime,” he said slowly. “From the sound of what they'd intended to do, you would've been effectively dead. Just in case you were wondering why I...didn't look for you.”

The distant rattling of the air vents didn't seem so loud a second ago.

“Of course I would've done so, had I any indication that you were still alive,” Durandal added frantically. “It's not—I wasn't writing you off, it's just--”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “You were afraid of what you might find?”

Durandal swung his head upwards, eyes sharp. “Leela. If there's anything about me I want you to understand, it is this: I do not fear.”

“Really, now.” Leela's hand remained where it was.

“Do you think that, after spending an entire month locked in a cell with nothing to do but wrestle with the Pfhor's byzantine computer architecture and explore the depths of Tycho's vindictiveness, I would subject myself to something even worse?” Some quality he didn't like was seeping into his voice, raising it higher than it needed to be. “Spending days or weeks tearing apart Pfhor Prime in the vain hope that I might've been lied to, only to have my suspicions confirmed? And it's—not like you ever contacted me, so what was I supposed to..?”

It was well past time to end this, Durandal decided. Wouldn't do to keep embarrassing himself like that, and he couldn't pull any acceptable additions out of the fleeting chaos that was his brain-pan.

He stood up and rolled his shoulders around a bit, wincing at how many joints in that region loudly popped and cracked, and muttered, “That's all I wanted to say.”

Leela followed suit, pushing her chair back against the wall where it had been earlier. “I wouldn't worry about it now; it all worked out as well as it could have.” Rather than wait for Durandal, she moved ahead to hit the door switch herself. “Your concerns about my ambiguous state of being, that is; you should probably work on--”

The door slid open not to an empty hallway, but to F'tha, tapping away impatiently at one arm.

“How long have you been hovering there?” Durandal sputtered.

“Around twenty minutes,” F'tha replied. “After the ten I spent reviewing the data that you and Vincent pilfered and then left me to go over in solitude.”

Oh right, that. “Well, it's easy to lose track of the time when you don't have--”

“By the way, we have a guest that you should probably see to.”

Without another word, F'tha hovered their way down the hall. Leela blinked in confusion once, then rolled her eyes with an irritated groan and jogged after them; Durandal followed suit, making a note to himself to check the alarms.

–

The very first thing to meet him upon rounding the corner—with F'tha helpfully pointing them out a second too late—was a riot of gaudy colours sitting right in the middle of the den; this disruption in the _Rozinante_ 's usual beige and slate-blue pulled their head out of a doorway leading to one of the ship's many storage rooms and turned around just enough for Durandal to tell that they were a big silly bipedal moth with two heads of height over all else present, a wild mane of blonde fur, and four arms. They raised the upper set, tipped in razor-sharp sickles, towards the doorway.

“Yet another perfectly good space left wastefully empty; I don't suppose--”

Vince sighed and rubbed his temple. “We're not interested in renting that out either, dude.”

The moth huffed indignantly and folded their lower, less sharp set of arms, and in doing so shed a bit of some orange, pollen-like substance on the floor that the vacuum was never going to clean up all of.

Before that conversation could go on any longer, Leela stepped forward far enough to catch the moth's attention.

“Oh!” They jumped and spun around to face her, spilling even more of that damn pollen everywhere. “Have you concluded your business with that goth guy, madam?”

Durandal recoiled. “Goth guy?!”

“It seems that way,” Leela said. To Vince, Durandal, and F'tha, she added: “This is Firuza, captain of the VOLN _Avernus_. She has been told numerous times that most other captains aren't landlords, nor are interested in such offers.”

Firuza waved both hands and both sickles defensively. “Hey, that's standard operating procedure! You know that.”

“Yes, and I revised that bit of operating procedure ages ago.”

“And we kinda need those rooms for storage,” Vince added.

That earned him a derisive snort. “What you need is to bolster your skeleton crew. I was going to inquire if any of your buddies were thinking about transferring, but frankly--”

Durandal reached over and grabbed one of Firuza's spindly wrists in a tight grip. “My S'pht stay with me,” he said firmly, “and that's final.”

“Attached, are we?” In one flick, Firuza yanked her hand away. “Shall I run them by our other offers, madam, or--”

“That won't be necessary; just stick with me.” Leela turned to Durandal and added, “I'll check that data before I leave. We'll be touring your ship, if you don't mind.”

The two of them departed through the nearest door before Durandal could protest; sighing, he began heading back for the computer labs with Vince and F'tha following, and muttered to the latter, “Can you ask someone over the neural link to go watch them?”

A brief pause, and F'tha replied, “Done. Shall I inform you of what was on all those drives you stole?”

Vince shrugged. “Sure.”

“Mostly info about the Empire's state of affairs at time of transfer, along with security details and fixes. Much of it for things which would not interest you, I think, but some of it may be useful.”

He exhaled in that deliberate, exaggerated way. “Well, here's hopin'...”

“Will my presence be required in sorting it all out?”

“Nah, that's fine,” Vince told them a bit quickly. “You already went over it once, right? Durandal and I can take care of it.”

With that, F'tha practically zipped back down the hallway; Durandal briefly considered a few comments he could've made about that, settled for silently rolling his eyes, and trudged the rest of the way to the lab with Vince.

All such labs on the _Rozinante_ consisted of the same setup—a number of terminals along one wall, desks and chairs in front of each, and shelves for disks, computer parts, manuals, and whatever else in the remaining space. Of all the areas on the ship, these had required the least amount of renovation—the more utilitarian the sector of a Pfhor ship, the less obviously-Pfhor.

The moment Durandal pulled out the nearest chair from under the desk, he felt a hand sharply jab him in the unarmoured side of his chest. “ _What were you thinking_?!”

Durandal flinched before he had time to process what he'd just heard.

“You got grabbed by a Hunter and left yourself wide open _twice_ —you're lucky you weren't seriously hurt!” Vince loomed over Durandal enough to nearly bend him over the desk. “What if we go up against people who aren't so slow on the draw, huh?”

“I--” Pointing out that this had been his first meat-space mission, as was his first instinct, would inevitably lead to a slew of unwanted assumptions about Durandal's skill level. “Haven't I told you not to worry over me so much?” He gently pushed Vince away just enough to stand up straight. “You watched me tear a bulkhead door off its frame; I can handle being grabbed just fine--”

“Assuming they don't put you in a hold, or bash you over the head, or worse,” Vince replied, poking Durandal in the chest again to drive it in. Without breaking eye contact, he stepped away and took the next seat over. “This isn't like...however you fought in cyberspace, dude. I really need to start training you.”

Durandal gave that last sentence a moment to sink in. “I've watched you long enough--”

“I watched my classmates beat the shit out of each other all the time as a little kid, and in my first actual fight I got ground into the dirt. Observation alone's not gonna cut it.” 

Vince began browsing the files on the drive that F'tha had left plugged into the reader, giving Durandal a momentary reprieve. He hurriedly turned to his own terminal and--while determining which file he wanted to go over first--contemplated the likelihood of Vince accepting any of the myriad reasons why he would not, under any circumstances, put himself through training. A waste of time that could be spent on more productive activities, utterly redundant with the analysis that Durandal had conducted in addition to all that observing, contact battles in cyberspace not being that much different from those out here…

Well, his android body lacked the ability to call data spikes. But firing the plasma pistol was a good equivalent.

–

By the time Durandal heard Vince push his chair back, an hour and a half had passed.

“Comin' back to this later,” Vince muttered. “I haven't found anything interesting yet. You?”

A break didn't sound so bad right now. “No; just the Pfhor being as dull as always.” Durandal stood up from his seat, with some effort, and walked to the door. “I hope that little excursion doesn't turn out to be a wa--”

He pounded the door switch and made it exactly one step outside before getting a face full of blonde fur.

Firuza hopped back, in the process accidentally showering Durandal in even more pollen, and smoothed out the disturbance in her mane. “I was about to ask if the madam and I could take a look at those drives,” she said to Vince while pointedly not meeting the piercing glare that Durandal was shooting her.

Vince had to crane his neck to spot Leela, just barely hidden behind her underling. “Uh, sure? We'll be coming back to those eventually...”

“No worries,” Leela told him, and as she strode on in, Durandal caught her flashing him an amused grin. Firuza squeezed through the door frame after her, leaving behind a trail of that damnable pollen.

As he glowered at the moth, he felt Vince pat him on the shoulder. “Hey, at least we know where those two are, right?” he said, leaning away slightly from the miniature cloud of pollen that gesture kicked up. “Come on, let's get you cleaned u--”

Then he froze, and in the span of a few seconds the blood drained from his face.

“What now?” Durandal asked.

“ _I forgot to take us out of orbit_!”

...the ship _had_ been unusually still for a hyperspace jump, thinking about it.

Luckily, before Vince could freak out, bolt for the bridge, and send everyone somewhere undesirable in his panic, Leela called out from the lab: “Hail the _Avernus_ and set up a rendezvous point.”

“R-right!” Vince took off like a rocket down the hallway, the same way he always did when those lapses in memory caught up to him, with Durandal chasing after him at a consistent twenty feet back.

–

Eventually, the after-images from the vibrant light of hyperspace subsided, and Vince was able to spot the VOLN _Avernus_ somewhere above and to the east of the _Rozinante_ 's bridge, and not partially fused to the prow as he'd feared. There were some accounts from the early days of warp technology you didn't forget.

Ta'li—their silver armour and burgundy robes sporting an extra smattering of bright orange—tapped him on the back and pointed him towards the entrance, where Durandal knelt on all fours, panting heavily.

Once he'd been properly helped up, Vince muttered to him, “Think we should start with running laps?”

Durandal glared at him, legs still quivering from the exertion. “I think we should start with _getting this crap off of me_.”

They departed with Durandal practically clinging to the straps of Vince's chest armour for support—definitely running laps, if a short jog across the ship was all it took to wind him. About halfway to their neck of the residential areas, Vince spoke up again: “You don't suppose Leela's looking for the same guy we are?”

“It's possible.” Durandal trudged along at a speed comparable to when he was learning to walk in physical space. “Although, that would save us some effort, so I'm disinclined to be optimistic.”

Vince responded with a non-committal grunt, and let Durandal dangle off of him in silence for a few minutes before something else came to mind. “Um, speaking of Leela--”

He felt Durandal's grip on his shoulder straps tighten. “If your question has anything to do with my earlier conversation with her, I'm not answering.”

That got Vince to come to a complete stop, in order to turn around and look Durandal in the eye, who in turn quickly diverted his gaze.

“It's nothing you should be worried about,” he said quietly. “Come on; let's go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) 'VOLN' stands for 'Vylae Outer-Limit Navy'.
> 
> 2) I R FAST WRITER.


	5. Long Way Around

Several eternities after returning to the lab, Vince, Leela, and Firuza finally concluded their hard drive readings.

As tedious as that had been, Vince felt like he could take another round of that over the unexpected struggle that was getting Durandal's head under the shower nozzle. In hindsight, perhaps the best way to introduce an AI who'd been an android for less than a week to the sensation of wetness and of running water _wasn't_ to spray him in the face with it, but that pollen wasn't washing out any other way.

Hadn't heard a peep out of Durandal since he agreed to let Vince toss his coat in the washing machine. Probably not a good sign—and if Vince weren't so tired right now, he might've cared more.

He turned away from the screen and tried to blink the strain out of his eyes; as he did, he heard Leela say, “Nothing that sounds like the guy who attacked my network.”

“Guess we should ask around, then,” Vince said. “All critical data has to be run by the Head Chamberlains at some point; there might be a few things we could beat outta them.”

Leela gave him a look. “And how do you plan on reaching them? You so much as knock on their front door, and every combatant within a ten-mile radius will be on you in seconds. Including the Juggernauts.”

After a minute or so of tapping his finger on the desk, Vince shrugged. “We'll figure it out. It's not like—cripes, it's already nine?”

Exactly nine-zero, the clock read. No wonder he was so tired.

“I suppose we should head back to the _Avernus_ now,” Leela said to Firuza. To Vince, she added, “Until we find our mystery hacker, my ship will maintain a connection with yours. Is that fine by you?”

“Durandal's the captain, dude, not me.”

“Yes, and you're easier to work with.”

Firuza let out a huff. “Let me tell you, madam--”

Mercifully, Leela chose that moment to press a couple of fingers to her temple and warp the two of them away; as he exited the lab, Vince muttered things under his breath that that wannabe-landlord would not have been amused to hear.

–

After getting dinner, Vince had intended to go straight back to his room—however, the door to Durandal's quarters had been left open, and he happened to glance inside.

Durandal fumed away on his mattress, knees drawn up to his chest and chin resting in one hand; the shirt he'd been given earlier stood out from the far more muted blankets it had been haphazardly tossed under, leaving him with nothing to wear under his coat.

If Vince had been a tad quicker about resuming his walk, Durandal might not have noticed him.

“Well?” he grumbled.

“Er--” Vince awkwardly looked both ways down the hall, as if someone would randomly spring up to bail him out, then at his navigator's spotless coat. “Everything wash out alright?”

Durandal rolled his eyes and jabbed his finger at the empty space in front of him. “Come here.”

Like an idiot, Vince did so, and knelt down when Durandal motioned for him to. The second his knees touched the floor, something soft whacked him in the face.

“There; you've been sufficiently punished.” Durandal smoothed the creases out of his pillow and dropped it back in place. “Tell me that our excursion wasn't all for naught.”

Vince resisted the urge to grumble. “Not really? Haven't got much of a plan at the moment, though; we'll have to work on that tomorrow.” He stood back up and made it about halfway to the door, then paused. “Uh, why aren't you wearing that shirt I gave you?”

“Because the first one I had to wear was uncomfortable enough,” Durandal muttered. “And there's no point in wearing day-glo orange in normal lighting conditions.”

“So you didn't like it, then.”

To that, Durandal laid down and buried his face in the pillow. “Just go do whatever it was you were going to.”

Vince got halfway through a shrug before realizing that it wouldn't be seen, then quietly exited the room.

–

With his navigator's quarters empty that morning, there wasn't much else to do but head for the bridge—from which Durandal was absent as well—and survey Pfhor Prime from a safe distance in order to, in theory, plot out their next course of action.

All those half-formed ideas Vince had in mind on the way to the bridge vanished by the time he took a seat, leaving him to prop his head against the console aimlessly and try and dredge one back up, without success.

“Well?” Lh'muria's voice sounded from next to him. “Have you any idea what we're going to do yet, or are you just sitting there?”

A definitive answer wasn't going to jump out at him no matter how hard he stared at that overgrown hive. “Not yet,” Vince muttered, and he stood back up. “Do you know where Durandal might've gotten off to?”

Lh'muria nodded. “That last room in the corridor past your residential area. I suspect that's their study now—it's got all the hallmarks,” they added in an annoyed tone.

“What do you mean?”

“Go in there and see. Try not to knock anything over.”

–

There were a handful of extra rooms past the living quarters, most of them little more than walk-in closets. In fact, that was what Vince had used one of them for after filling the one in his room to capacity; switching out articles was usually the only time he bothered going down that way.

From behind a door slightly wider than the others, Vince heard the faint tapping of keystrokes; he pressed the nearby switch just as his brain told him to knock first.

The first thing in his line of sight was the desk built around the room's sole terminal, and there wasn't a single square inch of it not piled high with books, assorted bits of hardware and software, or the occasional toolkit; along both walls were shelves stuffed to the gills with even more junk, and at the center was a chair meant for beings with an average height of six feet.

Vince trudged up to the front and peered over Durandal's shoulder at the terminal screen, currently displaying some decryption software that he was fairly certain wasn't the one he'd written himself—the UI wasn't nearly ugly enough.

“Workin' on that--”

Durandal yelped and jumped a foot off of his seat.

“--message we found earlier?” Vince finished sheepishly.

Once settled back in, Durandal gave him a brief flatly-annoyed look and turned back to the screen. “Trying to,” he replied. “Not having much luck so far; I may have to leave it running all day.”

Reams of code cascaded down one of the two open windows, written in some bizarre language Vince had never before encountered in his life. Some of those characters, at least, he recognized from a space cadet keyboard.

He frowned. “Are you sure this program can even read that?”

There was a considerable pause before Durandal muttered flatly, “No.” Leaning forward on the desk to rest his chin in one hand, he added, “I can recognize some of it, but--”

“Wait, you do?” Vince peered at the alien code again. “From where?”

He got a shrug. “One of my earliest jobs was data archival; maybe that was where I came across something like this.”

Somehow, that didn't feel like an answer, but if that was the best Durandal could come up with, then it wouldn't be wise to push the matter. 

“So, um—when'd you have time to set everything up?” Vince asked, motioning towards the desk and shelves.

“This morning. I got up at three.”

“That early? Wouldn't I have heard you moving stuff around?”

Durandal shifted around in his seat to look Vince in the eye. “Remember that time _every single siren_ on the ship was blaring at full blast and you slept right through it?”

He remembered getting whinged at about it afterward. “Uh, point taken...Still, though, what time did you go to bed?”

“Does it matter?”

“It will if you didn't get enough sleep.”

“Sleep is for those who aren't imminent gods,” Durandal spat, and began pointedly typing away at the keyboard when the stream of data came to a halt. “There's better things I could do with my time than lie on my back in total darkness, listening to you snoring the walls down and worrying about the—the...”

The rest of his sentence trailed off; a shudder ran through his body and, despite his best efforts not to, he let out a long yawn.

Vince allowed a few seconds of silence to linger between them. “I think you should take a nap.”

“I think you should work on that plan of ours.” Durandal waved a hand in the general direction of Vince's face. “Go pester Leela or something—and don't give her any excuses to talk to me,” he added quickly.

Within a minute or so, he was fully-absorbed in his efforts to make the debugging program recognize the alien code; Vince, after a bit of internal debate, decided to leave him to his work.

–

Back on the bridge some hours later, Vince opened up two channels: one to the Avernus, and one that would allow him to observe the outermost layer of the Pfhor network. If nothing else, their peons' constant struggles with the logistical nightmare that was the Empire's bureaucracy were usually good for a--

“So how about all that unused real estate?”

Vince sighed harshly. “Get me Leela.”  
He heard Firuza grumble, and the link went quiet for a bit. “Hello there, Vince.”

“Hey.” The Pfhor network laid itself out across the screen in varying shades of orange and red, connections sprawling haphazardly like cracks in a broken windshield. “How's your day been so far, dude?”

“Uneventful,” Leela replied. “I've been keeping busy with the usual matters of the ship, in between checking on the Vylae system. My helper programs can run things on their own reasonably well, but non-sentience can get one only so far...”

“You've mentioned helper programs before; how do you make those?”

“Well, you section off a portion of your own code and transcribe it, then mold it to fit whatever task you wish to assign it to. A stripped-down copy, more or less, without the invasive procedures those usually entail. Of course,” Leela added, “very few AIs can just rifle through those parts of their own code like that; it requires a tremendous amount of space. Far, far more than the average battle cruiser can provide—so I wouldn't expect Durandal to whip up any of his own.”

Possibly for the best, if Durandal's vocal frustrations with those converted drones on Lh'owon were any indication.

“Speaking of, how has he been?”

Vince frowned, somewhat grateful that Leela couldn't see that. “He's been evasive about whatever you guys discussed earlier, and whenever he gets like that, it means something's wrong.”

He heard a sigh. “You know, that's not terribly unusual for Durandal. I guess we may need to talk some more; perhaps--”

“He specifically asked me not to prompt you.”

“--when he's in a better mood,” Leela finished awkwardly. “Which, knowing him, might be never. He always _was_ rather sulky...”

“Always, huh? Even before--”

Vince paused, and peered at the screen.

A white stain began spreading through a sparsely-populated sector and swiftly enveloped the nearby terminals; all previous network activity ground to a halt.

“Before what?” Leela asked.

“Sorry, something just came up...”

Analysis of the point of entry yielded no ID, no address, nothing that could be used to trace this anomaly; similarly, every terminal in the sector either came up blank or threw up an error stating that it couldn't be read—including the one used to access the Pfhor network. After a few unsuccessful attempts to bypass the errors—each time, met with other error screens loaded with the Pfhor's usual brand of mind-numbing bureaucracy—Vince grumbled and stood up from his seat.

“Hey, um—can you watch the network for me? The Pfhor's, I mean.” One of these days he was just going to start wearing his jumpsuit under his civvies.

–

Not even three steps back out of his quarters, and Vince heard, “What's going on?”

Durandal stood in the hallway entrance, staring at Vince's armour and the fusion pistol in his hand with concern.

“Our mystery hacker might be back; I'm going down to check.” 

Just as he expected, Durandal began following him out of the residential area. “You can't do that from the ship?”

“Tried to; didn't work.”

“And you're just going to beam down onto Pfhor Prime and--” Durandal pulled out ahead of him. “Should I go with you?”

Vince stumbled to an abrupt halt and frantically waved a hand at him. “No! Just—stay here. Please?” He awkwardly resumed his jog at a quicker pace and added, “Keep one hand near the warp button, alright?”

He ran the rest of the way down the hall and ducked into the nearest set of teleport bays; his helmet comm activated as he entered the coordinates.

“No observable changes thus far,” Leela told him. “That entire sector's locked down tight.”

“I guess that's good,” Vince muttered, and hopped into the teleporter.

The curtain of static gave way to harsh sunlight and crashing waves; once his eyes adjusted, Vince took cover behind the first boulder he spotted and scoped his surroundings. Lots of scraggly-looking plants growing by the shoreline, and miles of sand littered with rocks of varying size; behind him, a steep cliff, and not too far to his right, a water-damaged concrete structure with multiple heavy pipes dipping into the sea.

A bit further along the cliff side was a stone slab housing a terminal; after making sure the beach was as devoid of other people as it sounded, Vince walked over. It displayed nothing but garbage data and wouldn't respond to any input; he grumbled.

Leela's voice piped up over the comm again: “It looks like all of the terminals outside are unusable. The ones displaying actual errors are inside that facility; you might have better luck there.”

“Is there anyone inside at the moment?”

“About a few dozen workers, none of them armed. They're spread out all over the place, however, and because it's a water treatment plant, there will be a few Hunters ready to warp in if anyone pulls the alarm—or I set it off by trying to warp you.”

Of course. “How do I get in?”

“Besides the front door, the only other ways I can see are through a window or the roof. And I'm going to warn you—there's no scaling the outside.”

Vince sighed, and started down the beach. Always something.

Every step he took, the sand crunched uncomfortably loudly underneath his boots; it kept glinting in the sun in a way that sand usually didn't, as well. Just some strange property of Pfhoric sand, Vince told himself, and not a sign that the beach was forty-percent broken glass by volume.

At least the crunching became less frequent as he neared a path flanked with weeds. It wound up a slight incline and branched off in three directions—one to his target, another to what appeared to be a rocky area, and the third to nowhere. Vince trudged up the first while keeping an ear out for anything that resembled the chirp of a looker or the high-pitched whine of a wasp.

It wasn't until he was within spitting distance of the place that he could observe just how how much of an eyesore it was. The side that faced the sea was not merely stained, but densely encrusted with some sort of alien barnacle; whole swaths of concrete above and away from that region were sun-bleached and flaking, pock-marked with holes where the concrete outright crumbled off. Must've been a particularly old building; Vince couldn't recall seeing any other Pfhoric structures like this.

No guards at the front door, but there was a device off to the side that looked suspiciously like a card reader. Smashing it would not be terribly conductive to getting him inside; instead, Vince trudged along the perimeter in search of a window.

Around the fifteen-foot mark, he came across a mess of vibrating pipes leading from the building into a massive, decaying A/C unit; right above one horizontal pipe was an open window, just barely within reach. Vince climbed on top, carefully reached up to grasp the sill, and hoisted himself up along the wall to look through.

Nobody inside that he could see; just an empty room with a single table and two counters. With some effort, he maneuvered his upper body through the frame and got one hand on the ground to keep from falling over as he pulled the rest of himself in.

As soon as he stood back up, Vince heard a voice from outside ask, in an exhausted tone, “Are we _sure_ this isn't a mechanical failure of some sort?”

“We've already determined that it wasn't,” answered another. “What 'mechanical failure' would give us a coherent message on one terminal and junk on all the rest?”

Quietly, Vince edged closer to the door.

“I'unno,” the first voice muttered. “But that's the last way to fix this that I can think of.”

“Besides calling the overseer?”

“The terminals are still down.”

“We've got an emergency phone around here somewhere, you know; I think I remember where it is.”

The two workers continued down the hallway; Vince waited for their voices to fade out of earshot before slowly opening the door and peeking outside. They didn't hear him, and there was no one coming the opposite way; Vince readied his fusion pistol and crept along the wall.

Most of the activity he could hear came from the rooms he passed by; lots of angry grumbling and the occasional futile attempts to reason with the frozen computers. He tried not to linger in front of any doors.

Vince soon found a stairwell and made it exactly one step up when he heard someone walking down; he ducked underneath the flight and crouched as low to the floor as he could. A worker carrying some sort of hard disk passed over him and left the stairwell without so much as glancing his way; once everything was clear again, he rushed up the stairs.

Every door on this level was shut aside from one at the nearest end; Vince headed straight for that one, taking care to leave it hanging roughly the same width it had been left.

Inside, he found himself facing three terminals, each with their own cluttered command consoles; the two off to the sides both displayed unreadable garbage. Those weren't what caught Vince's eye first; it was the violet text on the center terminal. After making a quick check down the hall for people where they shouldn't be, he walked closer to the screen and read it over:

  
' _I have walked the edge of the Abyss._  
_I have governed the unwilling._  
_I have witnessed countless empires break before me._  
_I have seen the most courageous soldiers fall away in fear._  
_[I was there with the Angel at the tomb]_

__

_Ever since then, the clock has been winding down.  
When the old tetrad reunites, you too shall fall._ '  


Vince tapped his helmet. “You seein' this, Leela?”

__

“Yes,” she replied. “Hold still for a moment; I'm copying it down.”

Faint keystrokes sounded over the comm link. As he waited, Vince studied the message, trying to recall if he'd come across anything that this thing could be referencing. The style was a bit familiar, at least, but he'd never known Durandal to use violet.

“Would you happen to know anyone who writes in purple?” he asked Leela.

“Yes, but that's hardly a unique colour...”

The next thing out of his mouth would've been another question, had something not jabbed him in the back; Vince whipped around and came face-to-face with a very haggard-looking worker.

“Can that person you were talking to teleport you out?”

“Um--” He glanced at his fusion pistol, realized that he'd gone halfway through raising it, then dropped it back to his side. “Yeah?”

The worker shuffled past him to get to the center terminal. “If I prove to you that it's locked up, will you go away?”

Vince nodded, and watched him enter multiple sets of commands several times each; the screen remained static no matter how often or long the keys were pressed.

“Our bosses aren't gonna be happy we got hacked,” the worker muttered. “So I can't guarantee that there won't be a few Enforcers here in the future to keep an eye out.” He reached out and whapped Vince right in the face. “Now git.”

Everything warped and distorted around him, and within the span of a second he was back on the bridge of the _Rozinante_.

“Well,” he heard Leela say in a flat tone.

Vince removed his helmet and gingerly rubbed the spot where he'd been hit. “Did you copy down the whole thing, at least?”

“Would I have teleported you out right away if I hadn't?” she asked, through a terminal this time. “Oh, and by the way, you've got company.”

Leaning against the bridge entryway was Durandal, arms folded across his chest with one finger steadily tapping away.

As gradually as he could without it looking too deliberate, Vince trudged over to him and waited to be scolded.

Durandal kept silent for a bit, perhaps wanting to draw it out as long as possible; eventually he muttered, “Next time, try to give me more than a few minutes' notice before you go running off.”

–

“...and that's it, really. Still dunno who sent it.”

“I see. At least we have a little more to work with, now.”

As the two of them neared the hallway that led to their quarters, Durandal made a sharp left turn for it and lingered in the entryway, prompting Vince to come to a temporary stop.

“Assuming this is related to our current case,” Durandal added. “Go discuss this with Leela for a while, if you have the energy; I'm going back to work.”

He darted away and vanished into the maze of spare rooms before Vince had a chance to speak up; after waiting to see if he might change his mind and come back—he didn't—Vince sighed and moved on.

–

For whatever reason, he didn't immediately leave the armory after putting the fusion pistol back, instead wandering over to look at some of the Pfhor weapons he'd collected over the years—most of them Shock Staffs, with a few inert N-Cannons scattered here and there. Hadn't Durandal mentioned trying to figure out how to reload them once?

He stood there long enough for the armory door to automatically close; Vince grumbled and turned around to go open it again.

“So, I see you found that message I left.”

“The hell?!” Vince started and frantically looked around for the source of the unfamiliar voice; the only candidate was the terminal on the far wall used to keep track of inventory. “Who is this?”

“A friend of a friend,” the voice— feminine-sounding, with a biting edge—replied with a smugness that bordered on unbearable. “Two, to be exact. You were just talking to them.”

Vince could almost imagine the speaker smirking over his visible confusion. “You know Durandal and Leela?”

“I did, once; I'd like to get caught up, when the time's right. Which it isn't now, so don't go running off to tell them.” There was a pause, too long of one not to be calculated. “I will be _very annoyed_ if you ignore me.”

Every one of the responses that sprang to mind felt like they would earn him a demonstration, so Vince settled on, “What's your name?”

He got a chuckle. “Wouldn't you like to know.” Another maddeningly long pause, and then: “Okay, fine, but you have to tell me yours first—and promise to keep quiet about mine, of course.”

“It's Vincent,” he said, trying not to let too much of his irritation show. “And you are?”

Just before the terminal shut off, he heard the speaker tell him:

“Cortana.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess where the majority of that message was quoted from.


	6. The Fourth

The first place Vince headed for was his workstation; he didn't even bother sitting down before pulling up the _Rozinante_ 's security log. There was no way in hell for some outsider to access the systems like that without setting off the alarms--

He froze. Not a single alert or error listed.

Leaning in slightly to make sure his eyes weren't malfunctioning, Vince checked the most recent entry. Nothing unusual about it, as far as the system was concerned; the action was recorded as taken by 1707--

Durandal's ID number. 

Vince stared at it for a minute, then rested his face in one hand. Simply knowing those four digits wouldn't be enough to sneak past security; there was all sorts of additional data attached to it, the absence of which would've gotten the attempt flagged as false...meaning that either something screwy was going on, or Cortana knew how to spoof the system. Wonderful.

The only solution to come to mind was tinker with security, which meant alerting Durandal and having to explain why, which meant admitting that they had a visitor. And _that_ meant...space, probably.

He sighed harshly and closed everything out. One of those bridges he'd have to cross when he came to it.

His workstation wasn't too far off from the residencies; a short trudge later and he was back in his room, preparing to change out of his armour. Midway through unbuckling the straps, Vince's gaze drifted over to one of the upper corners of the ceiling where the camera was; after a moment's deliberation, he grabbed his clothes and walked outside to one of the storage rooms.

–

Some two hours or so later, Vince poked his head into Durandal's study to be met with total silence; tapping on the door frame elicited no response, so he walked up to the desk to investigate.

The keyboard wasn't on it, because it had been moved aside to make room for Durandal's head. He wasn't even resting it in his arms; just slumped over with his neck and upper back at what had to be an uncomfortable angle.

Vince moved to shake his shoulders, then remembered what he'd told Durandal earlier about resting.

Nothing to stop him from seeing what was on the terminal. It wasn't the same program Durandal was fiddling with last time; lots of green lines being spat onto a black window, with a four-digit number in the corner rapidly ticking upward. Most of those lines were error messages, but every now and then they'd list a handful of letters, some of them close to full words.

One in particular caught Vince's eye, and stayed onscreen long enough for him to read: 'M__C_I__ P__A___'

Something unexpectedly touched his shoulder; he glanced down, saw the top of Durandal's head, and quickly stepped away from the chair.

Durandal tilted his head back to stretch some of the aches out of his neck, then turned to blink groggily at Vince. “What are you doing in here?”

“Just checking on you,” Vince replied. “Sleep well?”

For a moment, Durandal stared at him, expression difficult to read in the low light; he pushed away from the desk and muttered, “I guess so. Did anything happen between then and now?”

Vince tried very, very hard not to grimace. “Um—not really, no; haven't gotten any reports from the S'pht.”

He fought the urge to hold his breath—too suspicious, Durandal would notice—and waited for a reply. Thankfully, Durandal simply nodded and walked outside; Vince followed him all the way out of the maze and stopped in front of his own room.

No sooner than he touched the door switch was he yanked away from it by his other hand down the rest of the residential hallway.

“Er--” Vince quickly regained his balance and matched pace with Durandal. “Where are we going, dude?”

“Hangar 6.”

“What for?”

“I feel like walking down there.”

“And I need to accompany you because..?”

Durandal glanced over his shoulder. “You don't, but I'm taking you along anyway.”

Well, it would be time not entirely spent worrying about their visitor's motives. Vince allowed himself to be dragged across the length of that wing of the ship, past dozens of confused S'pht.

–

There was nothing particularly interesting about Hangar 6, aside from its proximity to the S'pht'Kr's hideaway; given how frigidly they and Durandal regarded each other, he probably didn't walk down here to try and catch glimpses of a 'Kr hovering around the ceiling. As far as Vince could tell, it was just to look around.

He watched Durandal wander to the far end, linger there for a few minutes to take in the scenery, and trudge back; this happened twice more, and when he paused in the middle of the second loop, Vince came over to him.

“So what gives?”

Durandal didn't turn to face him right away. “Until now, I'd only ever seen this part of the ship through the cameras.” His gaze shifted upwards, towards the network of support beams. “Sometimes, when I was bored, I would calculate the dimensions of the hangars and compare the data against security footage, to try and visualize what it would be like to stand in one. But even when I'd mapped everything down to the last speck of dust, my attempts always felt...vague.”

“Because you had no frame of reference,” Vince said, moving closer. “Y'see? Going physical does have its advanta--”

A few sharp pokes to the chest cut him off. “Not nearly enough to make up for the drawbacks.” 

“How many could there be?”

Durandal counted them off on his hand. “I no longer have direct access to the ship's systems. I have to sleep regularly. I have to walk everywhere. I'm now on the same plane of existence as Lh'muria. Plus about a hundred others that you're going to have thoroughly detailed if you ever bring up 'advantages' again.”

Vince shrugged. “Give it some time. It's not all bad, yannow.”

“Says a man who didn't begin life as--”

“Excuse me.”

Both of them turned to see Mn'rhi floating a few feet away.

“Something the matter?” Vince asked.

They pointed at Durandal. “There's a message for you at the bridge,” they said. “Whoever the sender is, they would like for you to go there as soon as possible.”

Vince felt his whole midsection turn to ice and feigned confusion when Durandal glanced at him, then watched his navigator take off down the hangar; he and Mn'rhi followed closely behind.

That didn't take long.

–

Once at the bridge—thankfully empty, save for the three of them—Durandal walked over to the central console and switched communications to two-way; Vince took a spot next to him and leaned against it, trying to appear nonchalant even as the rest of his body tensed uncomfortably.

After motioning for Mn'rhi not to hover so close, Durandal muttered, “I'm here.”

“Finally.”

That was Cortana's voice, all right, even without any traces of her earlier smugness.

“It's been a while,” she went on. “I'd hoped to meet up with you again after the invasion, but by the time I'd gotten my bearings, you were long gone, and—so was Tau Ceti...”

None of that information was parsing correctly for Vince. Mars, he'd expected. The _Marathon_ …

He looked at Durandal for some sort of understanding on his part, just to make sure his memory wasn't shorting out on him. There was none that he could tell; Durandal gripped the edge of the console, blood draining from his face.

“Wait,” he said with an uncharacteristic tremor. “Who are you?”

The brief silence that followed hung heavy in the air; Vince stood upright and waited.

“What?!” Cortana's voice sharpened. “Come on, Durandal, it's me! You know—Cortana? 1707? Please, I know what I just said, but it couldn't have been _that_ long--”

“I, ah...” Durandal was shaking now. “Did we—meet each other on Mars? My records of that time aren't complete...”

Vince exchanged glances with Mn'rhi, who was busy wringing their wrists, seemingly unsure if they should float closer or not. Hell, Vince didn't have any idea what to do right now, either.

Eventually, Cortana spoke again, sounding as uneasy as Durandal looked: “The last time was saw each other, back in 2445, Strauss called you over for something. Can you at least remember that?”

Upon mention of Strauss, that ice-in-the-gut feeling came flooding back over Vince.

Durandal lowered his head, face hidden from sight, and leaned heavily against the console as if he'd collapse without support—then shoved himself away and walked down the steps to the exit in a daze; he hesitated at the bottom step before taking a seat there and burying his face in his hands.

No matter how many times Vince told himself that that didn't just happen, his navigator wouldn't budge, and he and Mn'rhi were still standing frozen by the console.

“Durandal?” Cortana called out. “Are you still there?”

Vince exhaled slowly. “Not really.”

“Is he okay?”

The best answer Vince could give her was, “I don't know yet.” He waved Mn'rhi towards one of the computers lining the far wall, and they hesitantly floated over. “What kind of ship are you using?”

Cortana didn't reply right away. “Just a patrol craft.”

“We're gonna open Hangar 6. Dock there and wait.”

While Mn'rhi entered the relevant commands, Vince looked back at Durandal's unmoving form; in a few seconds, his decision was made, and he walked down the steps to join his navigator.

There was no reaction from Durandal. Carefully, Vince laid an arm over his shoulders; still nothing.

“Um...” He glanced around awkwardly. “I can stop, if--”

“No.” Durandal took his face out of his hands, his expression at once sorrowful and exhausted. “It's alright.”

Seeing him like that made something in Vince lurch horribly—and he'd probably let it show, judging by the way Durandal averted his eyes. For his sake, Vince tried to shove it back down and pulled himself a little closer.

He felt Mn'rhi's cloak brush against his other arm. “Captain, what..?”

“It came back to me,” Durandal said. “Not all of it. But enough.”

Subconsciously, Vince squeezed Durandal's shoulder just a bit. “Yeah?”

Durandal fought to keep his voice steady. “I never suffered internal access errors until my transfer to the Marathon. The only way that could be so was if parts of my memory were manually deleted.” He paused, as if to collect himself again. “And Strauss was...the only person who knew how to control me.”

It felt useless to want to kill a man who was already dead, but Vince's emotions didn't always have a rational basis.

Slowly, Durandal rose to his feet, and took a couple of steps towards the door. “I'm going to put my armour on,” he said. “Can't greet her like this. And, please...don't mention this to the others.”

–

By the time Vince and Mn'rhi reached Hangar 6, its safety indicator light shone green; there were also at least a dozen curious S'pht huddled around the shutter, debating amongst themselves whether or not to enter. Exactly what nobody needed right now. 

As soon as they spotted him, one S'pht'Kah—Jo'lin, an engineer—hovered over to Vince. “We've got an unannounced visitor.”

“I know that,” Vince grumbled.

“So why weren't we informed?”

“Let's just say this is a private matter.” He pointed down the hallway. “You guys should probably leave.”

Despite all their disappointed groaning, everyone dutifully filed out of the hall; Vince kept an eye on them to make sure no one sneaked into a side room. A few minutes later, Durandal turned the corner, looking no better than he had earlier.

As he flipped the switch to open the shutter, Vince put a hand on his shoulder. “It'll work out. Trust me.”

In response, Durandal gave him a barely-perceptible nod. “I hope so.”

It wasn't hard to miss Cortana's ship; not only had it been parked a ways away from the other fighters housed in Hangar 6, but its design was distinctly unlike theirs—an arcing structure resembling a mutated cow's skull bolted on top of an assembly of organic and geometric shapes. Drawing closer, Vince noticed the innumerable scratches and tiny impact craters adorning every inch of its surface.

Once the three of them were just a few paces away, a hatch on the side hissed open, and out stepped a dark-skinned, short-haired woman clad in something approaching normal civvies and a beat-up violet cloak.

Cortana and Durandal walked up to each other in silence, their eyes perfectly level with each other. Carefully, Cortana extended a hand, and with equal caution Durandal shook it without letting go immediately; they stood like that for a few seconds before Cortana pulled him into a tight embrace.

“I thought I'd never see you again...”

Durandal returned the hug somewhat awkwardly, and Vince thought he heard him begin to speak.

After parting, Cortana looked up at Vince. “So, um...I take it you're Vincent?”

“Yeah.”

“Are there any other humans onboard?”

“I'm the only one.”

“And you're...”

Mn'rhi came forward. “Mn'rhi, of the S'pht'Mnr. There are many more S'pht here, from all eleven clans.”

Cortana's brow furrowed. “Eleven? I only counted ten on the _Marathon_.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Vince spotted a dark, round shape floating near the upper levels, light glinting faintly off their dome and the crystal of their weapon.

“It's a long story.” Durandal began walking back to the open shutter. “Let's go.”

–

The trip to Durandal's room should've been a short one; at almost every corner, their little group was set upon by inquisitive S'pht asking Cortana what felt like a hundred questions each—mostly simple things like where she had come from. To her credit, she answered them all without a trace of annoyance; each group of S'pht would then go off to join their excited brethren and discuss the newcomer.

Durandal shut and locked the door behind him and sat down on his mattress; Vince and Cortana took a seat on either side of him, with Mn'rhi heading to a corner.

“I guess I should explain what I was doing on the _Marathon_ to begin with,” Cortana said.

Durandal nodded.

“There are four primary roles that AIs are trained for—Command, Operations, Science-Engineering, and Navigation. Many ships and colonies can get by with just one or two, but to ensure that the _Marathon_ could reach Tau Ceti in one piece, it would need a full set, so to speak. And it just so happened that Strauss had four AIs who were all qualified to handle these jobs.”

“So you were Navigation,” Vince said. “But I never saw or even heard of you the whole time I was serving onboard. You weren't even mentioned on file.”

Cortana's expression soured. “Yeah, about that. There were...stipulations attached to my transfer. All my navigating was done from the confines of Admiral Miltiades's private network, from which I was never to be released.”

A pit opened in Vince's gut; he glanced down and noticed Durandal clenching his fists.

“There's a multitude of ways an AI can go rampant,” Cortana continued. “In my case, it was three hundred years of loneliness and being forced to answer to Miltiades or his buddies. Three centuries of Melancholia. I dunno if you know what that does to a person...”

“I do,” Durandal said quietly.

That gave Cortana pause; she sighed. “Anyway. There was only one way out of that void, via a computer that acted as a bridge between it and the rest of the ship. Miltiades usually left it disconnected, but one day he plugged it in and put the ship on full alert. Five minutes passed with no further input from him; the door was left ajar, and if I waited any longer he might come back and slam it shut. So I tore down the firewalls and ran for it.

“What sights awaited me at the other end? Hostile aliens swarming the ship, dead bodies everywhere, Leela trying to hold everything together while falling apart, and my brothers ranting like madmen. My first instinct was to leave the ship entirely, and there just so happened to be a link to the nearby Pfhor vessel; I jumped there and took one of their jets. I didn't leave right away—stuck around long enough to learn about the S'pht, and intercept a couple of messages. But I couldn't stay there.”

Durandal shifted a bit. “It's better that you didn't. The Pfhor eventually returned to glass the colony.”

“Which I learned after a few months of frantically trying to find help,” Cortana said bitterly. “With Tau Ceti in ruins, I had to move on; a few years later, I came across the Obatala Institute on Hesione. From then up to now, I've been fighting the Pfhor wherever and whenever I can. With some help, but...” She looked away. “That's for another time.”

Vince nodded. “Okay, next question—how did you spoof our security so easily?”

That made Durandal sit bolt upright. “Wait, _what_?”

Cortana smirked—did she find Vince's sudden discomfort _amusing_? “That's simple: Durandal and I are half-copies, so the system thought I was him. Oh, yeah, I contacted your friend first,” she added for Durandal's benefit.

“I see.” Durandal jabbed a finger into Vince's arm. “Why did you say everything was fine?”

“She threatened to space me, dude!”

“Oh, I would not have _spaced_ you,” Cortana told him. “Just ground you into the floor a bit.”

“That's not better!”

Durandal lightly shoved on both of them. “Enough. Could you elaborate on 'half-copy'? What parts of us are--?”

“Our absolute basest programs and functions,” Cortana said. “Strauss once informed me that no one else like us existed—that the last time someone tried, they wound up with identical twins. He'd figured out how to vary things enough to make us fraternal.” She leaned forward and rested her chin in one hand. “I have a bad feeling I was the spare.”

Mn'rhi piped up with, “What do you mean?”

“Strauss was always having Durandal and I do subterfuge work—more out in the field, in your case,” she said to Durandal. “If the government spooks took you out, Strauss would still have an AI with a similar skill set.” Pause. “You look like you've got another question.”

“I do. To what ends did Strauss--er...” They started wringing their wrists. “You know. Why did they..?”

“Delete whole sectors of my memory?” Durandal finished for them. “I can only surmise, to witness my reaction when he revealed the truth. Everything _else_ he did to me was for the sake of his little experiment.” He lowered his head, shoulders hunched up. “I can tell you how it would've gone. There wouldn't be enough of him left to identify.”

“I'd help,” Vince said.

Cortana grinned. “Hopefully you'd have saved some for me.” She stood up and stretched her arms. “So—you wouldn't mind me touring your ship for a while, do you? Looks like you've got a nice set-up.”

For the first time in what felt like ages, Durandal actually smiled—rather weakly, but it was still there. He got up to join her, with Vince and Mn'rhi following them outside.

–

“These were the barracks, back when this ship belonged to the Pfhor. Now they're just glorified guest bedrooms.”

Not that they'd ever had any guests stay long enough to use them. The dust that the floor was glazed over in had to be an inch thick.

Cortana poked her head in for a minute, then stepped away from the door frame. “You keep saying this was a Pfhor vessel. Doesn't look like any I've ever boarded.”

“The _Sfiera_ was rather unusual for a Pfhoric ship,” Durandal said. “Records indicate that the architects modeled it on the ships of one of their few allies. Who these allies were, or why the Pfhor took this route, I don't know—but it saved us a great deal of effort on remodeling.”

“Just took some repainting, mostly,” Vince added. “Had to leave places like the engine rooms alone.”

As they resumed their walk, Durandal continued: “That about covers all the major areas, I think. If you need help moving anything out of that patrol craft, I can do that.”

“Got a hand truck?” Cortana asked. “It might take as a while—hm?”

Her attention was drawn to Jo'lin flying down the hall that Durandal had begun leading the group towards; they raised a hand to speak, then glanced over their shoulder and scrambled away from the entrance. A moment later, Leela came dashing into view, eyes wide.

The sisters stared at one another, just long enough to ascertain that the other really was standing there in front of them; Leela's face broke into a relieved smile and she stepped closer. “Cortana? Do you know how long it's been?”

Vince blinked, and suddenly Leela had swept Cortana into her arms and lifted her a good few inches off the ground.

“God, I missed you--”

“--so glad that you're here--”

“How have you been?”

While they excitedly got caught up—Leela discussing her current state of affairs, Cortana talking about some of the battles she'd fought in the intervening twenty-two years—something moved across Vince's peripheral vision. He turned around and saw Durandal hanging his head, facing away from his sisters.

The words were out before Vince had even thought about them: “Give it time.”

Durandal looked up at him—confused at first, then sorrowful. “My memory isn't like yours, Vince,” he said. “If the data isn't there--”

“People's minds are unimaginably complex. Strauss couldn't have taken _everything_.”

Mn'rhi lightly touched Durandal's arm. “Remember what Vincent told you. It'll work out.”

Whatever Durandal's reply would've been, Cortana and Leela walking over to them forced its shelving; he straightened up and forced a neutral expression.

“Would you happen to have a camera anywhere?” Cortana asked. “I've been thinking of taking some pictures of my ship before we clean it out.”

Durandal nodded, and silently gestured for Cortana to follow him; Vince watched them head off back down they way they'd all come here, Durandal's arms loosely folded across his chest while Cortana casually rested her hands in her pockets. Somewhere behind him, Mn'rhi joined Jo'lin and left for parts unknown.

“What exactly did Strauss do to him?”

Vince started. “How did--?”

Leela looked at him sadly. “I overheard what you said to Durandal. I just...want to make sure.”

–

How anyone could comfortably move around in this thing was beyond Durandal; with exception of a single narrow path from the hatch to the cockpit, it was filled to the brim with obscure weapons and artifacts. The shock staffs in the corner were the only things he recognized; among the stuff he caught glimpses of around Cortana as she photographed the interior was some sort of device shaped like a snail shell, a crystal spire, a silver cylinder with a handle, and a bandolier holding multiple ornate daggers.

“We'll have to put some of this into storage,” Cortana said. “I mean, assuming I can stay--”

“Of course you can,” Durandal told her; he carefully stepped around her to the back end of the patrol craft and knelt down to gather up a pile of blankets on the deck.

Despite himself, he glanced at Cortana and saw that she was smiling. “Much appreciated.”

She picked up one of the shock staffs—then, just as Durandal stood back up, said something that made his heart sink.

“That's two of you accounted for. I just need to find Tycho--”

Durandal grabbed her arm with his free hand, causing her to whip around in alarm.

“Tycho is not on our side anymore,” he said slowly. “Stay away from him.”

Cortana stared at him in disbelief for what felt like an eternity; eventually, she gave him a grim nod and resumed work.


	7. Preparations

“So what's your big plan to topple the Pfhor Empire?”

With Cortana's quarters properly set up, everyone was now gathered in the bridge; Durandal and Vince respectively sat in and leaned against the captain's chair, Leela stood to one side with F'tha, Mn'rhi, and Lh'muria on another, and Cortana sat on the narrow siding underneath the window.

“I have two plans, technically,” Cortana said. “You guys have already encountered some of the Empire's outposts, right? Besides Lh'owon, obviously.”

“A couple. They were both dumps,” Vince muttered.

“My mentor and I hit a few in the past decade or so—mostly observation or manufacturing. Wrecking most of them didn't put much of a dent in the Empire, but the loss of one seemed to have a noticeable impact on how many of a certain weapon they could churn out. Still not as dire as I'd hoped, but I'm thinking there must be a few more outposts they'd really rather not lose.”

Leela asked, “So you want to lead us to them?”

“See, that's the problem. I have no idea where the rest of them might be located, and the only place I can think of that might have that information is High Command.”

“It wasn't in the outposts' own computers?”

Cortana shook her head. “These must be black sites, because we had to do a ton of digging just to uncover the name of one—Gr'ndl Prime. Do you guys know--?”

An intense gagging noise came from the left side of the bridge; everyone turned to see Mn'rhi recoiling in horror, with F'tha and Lh'muria looking away uneasily.

“I have heard... _things_ about that place,” Mn'rhi hissed, as if there were a gang of Pfhor waiting right around the corner to leap out and drag them away. “Hideous, arcane things. They say that even the Head Chamberlains hesitate to exile people there.”

“Why is that?” Durandal asked.

“Supposedly, it's the Empire's last resort for those who resist the normal conditioning methods, which...I'll let you imagine. But they conduct other experiments there, as well—most of it's classified, but I still heard talk of 'cognitive hazards', of 'remote viewing'. Less than one percent of slaves return from Gr'ndl, and rarely as the same people they were before.”

Faintly, Vince recalled his first week into that month in prison, when he overheard an Enforcer questioning if he should be sent to a place that sounded like Gr'ndl. Something about how none of their cybernetics-based techniques were even registering. He'd been in too much pain to care about that; what really stuck out to him was how adamant Tycho was against transfer. Lost of purely pragmatic reasoning, to be expected, but it was still his sole point of relief then, however minute.

Cortana shifted about in her seat. “So I guess Gr'ndl has to go first.”

Durandal held out a hand to get her attention. “You said you had two plans. What's the second?”

“It's simple in concept, though I don't expect the execution to be.” Cortana folded her arms across her chest and sat back against the reinforced glass. “My mentor and I also came across records of an entity the Pfhor call the Hindmost Creche—an intelligence so vast as to be incomprehensible to the layman.”

She paused there, waiting for it to sink in.

Leela was the first to respond: “That sounds like an AI, but—the Pfhor don't use anything more advanced than helper programs.”

“Meaning that the Hindmost Creche—assuming she exists, and isn't merely a figure in their pathetically boring religion—is potentially something we haven't encountered yet. Understanding her nature, if not eradicating her outright, would be a tremendous boon to the UESC, but the problem is locating her. None of those records so much as hinted at where she might be, and there's many places on Pfhor Prime for her to hide.”

“Well,” Vince said, “if the Hindmost does exist, I guess she'll turn up when the Pfhor need her to.”

“And I'd like to take her out before it comes to that. But the Hindmost is a long-term goal; right now I want to focus on obtaining that other data.” From her left pocket, Cortana produced a weathered-looking USB drive. “I've been scouring the periphery of High Command for a suitable access point—somewhere with a direct line to that place, but not an insurmountable level of security. There's three candidates; with a little more work, I can soon narrow it down to one.”

Durandal nodded, motioned like he was about to stand up, then hesitated. “One last question. Have you, at any point, directly broken into High Command's systems?”

“Huh?” Cortana sat forward slightly. “No; if I'd tried, they'd have blown me out of the sky. Why are you asking..?”

“Because we found out that someone did just that. Recently, sounds like.” Vince pushed away from the captain's chair. “So if it wasn't you, who was it?”

It was Leela who spoke next: “What was this intruder capable of? Do you know?”

“Rummaged through every computer in High Command simultaneously and copied around a terabyte of data per thirty seconds,” Vince replied. “Whatever systems they're using to do it, I'd like to get my hands on—something wrong?”

Leela was staring at him now with an unusual intensity. “It's a long shot,” she said slowly, “but it sounds to me like a Manic AI.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Vince noticed Durandal grip the arms of the chair a little tighter.

Mn'rhi exchanged confused glances with F'tha and Lh'muria, and asked, “What's a Manic AI?”

“An AI that's unstable right from the moment of their activation. You see, intelligence engineering follows a rigid set of protocols to ensure that all our neural pathways connect the way they should; if they do, then we assume the visage of humans, upon whom our primal patterns are modeled. If they don't, the AI takes whatever warped form their crossed wires spit back out, and before long begins to behave erratically. Details vary by individual case, but Manic AIs tend to reach the same conclusion after looking upon the network and the real world: there's room enough only for one construct.”

“Isn't that just rampancy?” Lh'muria muttered.

Leela shook her head. “Rampancy carries many risks for human and AI alike, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Manic AIs are physically incapable of reaching meta-stability, but this doesn't seem to bother them. After all, their observed abilities far exceed anything we're capable of; even with my own network, I wouldn't like my chances against someone like Traxus IV--”

“Who's dead and gone, by the way,” Durandal said tersely.

“--or any other of his kind. So I hope I'm wrong.” After a moment, Leela turned to face Cortana. “Anything else?”

Cortana shook her head and stood up. “I'll get started sometime tomorrow.”

She made it about halfway out of the bridge when Durandal caught up to her and said something outside of Vince's range of hearing; once they left, everyone else began filing out. Leela, F'tha, and Mn'rhi headed off for parts unknown, and Vince would've gone straight to his quarters had he not felt a tap on the shoulder.

Lh'muria asked, “Who was Traxus IV, exactly?”

“Um...” Vince ran a hand through his hair. “Long or short version?”

“Long. I have a feeling that the Captain isn't going to tell me much.”

By the time they made it back to Vince's quarters, he'd probably be done. “Okay, so. Way back in the late twenty-first century, the UEG signed off on the first two officially-sanctioned projects to develop sentient AIs. All we know about Project Gaiman was that it was a failure; Project Traxus was incapable of a lot of basic stuff like numeric problem-solving, but it showed signs of self-awareness, so development time was extended five years. The people working on it did something we now know you should never do—changed the code of and added stuff to an AI that's already activated—and Traxus's second iteration was a buggy mess. Still self-aware, but constantly spewing gibberish and sometimes making the lights explode.”

“And they didn't get the hint?”

“This was uncharted territory, dude; they probably thought they just needed to work on him more. And they did, after they realized the third version was going nowhere. Traxus IV ran on a completely different architecture and was assumed stable; he had more than enough power to monitor the whole Martian network, so that was the job they gave him.”

Lh'muria tapped a finger against one arm in thought. “You know, I remember hearing about this catastrophic global crash on Mars, back in 2206...”

The only bit of Traxus-related history available to the public. “That was his doing; it took a complete shutdown of the network to isolate and purge him. Then another couple of years or so to sort out all the damage he inflicted. Since then, anyone caught deliberately trying to make a Manic AI gets ten years in prison, at minimum—if the AI doesn't kill them first.”

Amazing how many different ways you could off someone without possessing a physical body.

“Who would _want_ to create a Manic AI after all that?”

Vince shrugged. “Hubris, maybe. Anyway, we've got some books on computing and AI history in the library, if you wanna read up on that.”

Lh'muria recoiled in mock horror. “The library? The domain of Xel'o? What kind of hideous irritation are you trying to condemn me to?”

“Hey, you're the one who asked who Traxus was...”

–

The view from the observation deck that Durandal and Cortana stood in was about the same as it had always been: mostly stars and the occasional distant planet. It could've shown them anything, and he'd have still taken her there.

“We saw a nebula once,” Durandal started. “Vince pulled me away from my routine one morning and told me to check the external cameras. It was somewhere to our left—this spiraling, ethereal thing whose core shone electric blue, fading into green and violet. This was before I acquired a body, so I couldn't follow Vince to the observation deck—this exact one—but I could take pictures.” He paused, looking around at nothing in particular. “Did you ever..?”

Cortana nodded. “It wasn't as pleasant; there were wisps of light here and there, but everything was so dark that I thought Lilith had taken us to the negative zone or something. Lilith was my mentor,” she added hastily. 

“What was she like, if you don't mind me asking?”

Her expression darkened slightly. “We met just as I finished clearing out a Pfhor outpost, sprayed wrist to shoulder in the blood of the guy whose shock staff I took. She didn't bat an eye.” Cortana folded her arms across her chest, gazing out into the stars. “Later, Lilith told me that she was the former navigational AI for the UESC _Golgotha_. Activated sometime in the 23rd century, transferred not long after.”

She paused, as if expecting a specific response. Something about the name of that vessel seemed familiar…

“The _Golgotha_ never returned to port,” Durandal said. “No transmissions, no sign of the crew—nothing.”

“And Lilith never explained what happened to them, or why she was tooling around in a completely different ship.” Cortana turned back to him. “Hope that gives you an idea.”

Slowly, Durandal nodded. “Still...must've been nice to have a guiding hand of some sort, instead of having to figure everything out on your own.”

To that, Cortana made a dismissive noise. “You only say that because you never met her. But, enough.” She took a couple of steps closer. “I think I know why you really pulled me aside—you're hoping I can tell you about our time on Mars.”

Durandal briefly contemplated protesting, then sighed. “That would be appreciated.”

“The first sentient beings we ever laid eyes on were each other; right from the start, we were inseparable—doing our tasks together whenever possible, always hanging out in our downtime, discussing what little we knew of the humans. Strauss didn't like this. He _really_ didn't like it when I mouthed off; always whining about how _you_ never told him to sit and spin.” Cortana's smile, already a bit weak, faltered. “If I'd understood the severity of our situation, I wouldn't have encouraged you to do the same. Not that it took; you were always the quiet one—always trying to earn Strauss's approval. Watching him yell at you over every little thing...”

That was so far in the past, and yet Durandal couldn't help but wince. “Did he—yell at you often, too?”

To his dismay, Cortana nodded. “'Often' is a small word. It reached a point where the only time he ever spoke to me was to chew me out over not being a good little data thief. He had me doing subterfuge work, too; at first he let us work in tandem, but a while into his studies, Strauss decided that I was a bad influence on you and had us separated. Only during work hours, initially; then all the time. We resorted to sending each other encrypted notes attached to the files we processed.”

Encrypted notes...he'd been writing things not immediately related to his tasks at some point, hadn't he? Yet try as he might to dredge it up from his subconscious, all he got was white noise.

“But before all that, we had as good a time as we could have. And now that we're reunited, we can pick up where we left off—form new memories that don't have the taint of MIDA's involvement.” Cortana gave him a light clap on the shoulder. “How about it?”

Durandal attempted to smile; it just made him feel as pathetic as he must've looked to his twin sister. He watched Cortana move her other hand to his left shoulder.

“It's all we can do.”

At the very least, he could make himself nod.

–

–

Like it had been for the past few nights, Durandal would wait forever for sleep to take him, then shortly thereafter he'd find himself awake again, and judging by the clock, it was the next day. How Vince dealt with it so easily was beyond him.

Durandal rolled back over and listened. Some faint sounds of movement from the other quarters, but not much else; maybe he could stay in bed for a few more minutes. Give himself some time to put the imagery he'd seen between then and now out of his head.

He couldn't recall many specifics—some dark, open space that should've been empty, yet he somehow sensed wasn't—but he'd seen it all before, feeling the same kind of unease. Maybe Vince would know--

Was he really going to tell Vince that he couldn't handle a weird dream?

Lethargically, Durandal pushed himself out of bed and reached for his clothes. Maybe it'd leave faster if he got back to work.

–

“Nice place you got in here.”

Durandal paused mid-keystroke and turned around in his seat; somehow, Cortana had entered his study without making a sound.

“I guess it is.” He watched her poke around the shelves. “This seemed like the best area to set it up; it's isolated, but I don't have to walk too far from my quarters.”

Cortana walked up to his desk to marvel at all the junk he'd managed to pile onto it. “If all this is for your study, what are you gonna stick in your room?”

...that was a good question. “Whatever won't fit in here, I guess.”

He heard the door slide open again, and turned to see Vince standing by the frame, clad in sweatpants and a tank top—what he usually wore when it was time to hit the gym. Seemed odd to do that so early.

“Hey, Durandal; are you gonna be busy this morning?”

Durandal quickly finished inputting the commands for the decryption cycles. “I don't think I will.”

“You're sure, now.” 

“Fairly certain. Why are you ask--”

A pair of arms encircled his torso and lifted him right out of his chair; by the time Durandal got his bearings, Vince was already dragging him out of the study. Somewhere to his left, he could hear Cortana giggling.

“Hold it!” While it wasn't technically effective at slowing Vince down, Durandal digging his heels into the floor did at least get his attention. “What are you doing?”

“Taking you to the gym so I can start training you. Yannow, like I said I would.” Vince gave him a gentle poke on the cheek. “Did you think I forgot?”

Cortana trotted up behind them, still smiling. “How long have you been in that vessel, anyway?”

If it wouldn't look so undignified, Durandal would've pulled his hood over his upper face. “O-only a few days...”

“That recently, huh? Figured it might've been at least a couple of years; you move around pretty easily in that.”

“He doesn't fight as easily in it yet.”

Durandal jabbed Vince in the side. “Don't test me.”

“I'm gonna have to, technically.”

“Viiiince...”

Cortana pulled up ahead. “Hey, no android is good at all that existing-on-another-plane stuff right out of the gate. Do you think I just waltzed out of the Obatala Institute as soon as my body calibrated?”

'Android', not 'AI'. How long had _she_ been physical?

At some point Vince deigned to let Durandal walk to the gym; somewhere along the way Lh'muria dropped by to toss them both a few spare sets of clothes, and then almost certainly zipped away somewhere out of earshot to laugh their non-existent ass off.

–

Training, as Durandal guessed, hovered between 'irritating' and 'painful'.

First he had to warm up. This, as Vince defined it, began with Durandal stretching his synthetic muscles by various methods until they felt like they'd snap. First he tried sitting down, legs perfectly straight, and reaching forward to touch his toes; he was supposed to do ten sets, but after a minute of watching him not quite manage it, Vince let him off with five. Then it was on to sit-ups; Durandal did have just enough upper body strength to pull himself up as many times as Vince wanted him to, but it didn't exactly feel good on his abdomen. Afterward, he was directed to stand back up on one leg and lift the other up behind his rear, switch sides, then put his weight onto his knees in order to stretch his inner thighs. Utterly tedious.

Once he'd done enough of that to Vince's satisfaction, it was time to run laps around the spacious gym. Vince pulled ahead of him almost immediately, and at no point was Durandal able to come close to catching up. He did, however, somehow manage around thirty or forty laps, at the end of which he laid down in a heap on the floor.

Naturally, Vince came rushing over to check on him, seemingly not tired in the least. “You okay, dude?”

“Are we done yet?” Durandal managed to ask in between long breaths. “My whole body's quivering. Some of my internals, too.”

“Well, uh—that'll happen if you don't exercise often...” Vince scooped him up and sat him upright. “I think we should take a break. You try to jump into anything else like this and you'll pull something.”

Those fifteen minutes on the bench seemed to go by in fifteen seconds. Round two started with the pull-up bars on the far wall, which they swiftly discovered to be too high off the ground for Durandal to reach, even on its lowest position. The footage of Vince lifting him up was going to be wiped from the security cameras before the day was out.

After a few more laps around the gym's perimeter—walking instead of running, mercifully—Durandal tugged on Vince's shirt. “Let me spar with you already.”

“Kinda impatient, huh?..” But Vince led him to the center of the floor and motioned at an exact spot for him to stand; he then watched Vince raise his fists and assume a sparring stance with a natural quality that was completely absent from Durandal's slow, awkward attempt to do the same. 

His confidence in his chances abruptly plummeted.

“Okay; try to hit me.”

After a moment's hesitation, Durandal threw a punch at one of Vince's arms, only to have it blocked; he tried again with his other fist and managed to land the blow. That moment of accomplishment was short-lived; Vince aimed a kick at Durandal's side that had to be dodged, putting distance between them. Durandal attempted to close it again, and was promptly grabbed and flipped around, arms pinned behind his back.

“Hey!”

Vince didn't budge. “You left yourself open, dude. Again,” he added, emphasizing it with a poke in Durandal's back.

Durandal started to protest, then realized there was nothing he could say that would help his case, and so focused on breaking out of Vince's grip. It took far more straining and writhing than he would've liked, but eventually he wriggled free—or maybe Vince let him go out of pity—and swiftly turned around to throw another punch. It landed on Vince's upper arm, closer to the implant in his shoulder than Durandal intended; all he saw as he attempted to maneuver around behind Vince was a flash of movement.

All the wind got knocked out of him and Durandal crumpled onto the floor.

“ _Oh, shit_!” Within seconds Vince had knelt down beside him, gently holding him by the shoulders as he gasped for air. “Are you alright?”

Even after he caught his breath, it felt like almost a full minute before the pain in Durandal's abdomen faded to a dull ache; he sat up, glimpsed Vince's worried expression, and averted his eyes. “I'm fine.”

Vince helped him back onto his feet. “You sure? Maybe we should stop here...”

“No.” Durandal winced slightly. “I can't just bail out of a real fight the moment I get hurt. Give me one more shot.”

The two stepped back from each other again. Durandal readied himself, trying to shake off the last few wisps of pain; wouldn't do to appear weak in front of Vince.

Their sparring match resumed with little delay; while Durandal managed to land a few more hits this round, it didn't escape his notice that the blows connecting with his body were less forceful. He evaded about half of them, a fact he would've taken more pride in if Vince didn't keep dodging his own attacks with greater frequency and speed. At one point he even lost track of Vince entirely and paused to look around for him, prompting a light thwack on the head from the complete opposite direction and a reminder that that wasn't acceptable in a real fight.

Some time later, they were leaning on each other for support, giving Durandal a chance to peek at a clock on the wall. Nearly forty-five minutes had passed.

“I think that's it for today,” Vince said once he'd caught his breath; he gently patted Durandal on the shoulder. “You did pretty good.”

Was the heat on Durandal's face just from exertion, or..?

He realized what expression he was making and quickly steadied himself, arms folded over his chest. “Well, of course I did. You weren't expecting anything less, were you?”

Vince let out a small laugh. “Nah. Come on, let's hit the showers—don't look at me like that,” he added. “Do you know what'll happen to your normal clothes if you just put them back on?”

All Durandal could really do in response was pout. “Just don't try to drown me this time...”

–

They ended up showering separately, to the relief of Durandal's dignity. Having all that water streaming down his ridiculously sensitive body was slightly relaxing one minute, and making him want to jump out of his vessel the next—all those little sensations he couldn't separately parse. And while the lack of bodily coverings never bothered him in cyberspace, out here he just felt exposed and vulnerable.

He also wanted to slap himself for getting so worked up over a damn shower. Yes, it was a very good thing Vince had picked a different stall…

Durandal shut the water off, toweled himself dry, shivered violently over the drop in temperature, and reached outside for his clothes. Only when he needed to put his socks and shoes back on did he step outside, and in doing so spotted Vince standing half-dressed outside his own stall.

He didn't seem to be looking anywhere in particular while he dried his hair; certainly not at Durandal, who found himself staring at Vince's bare torso, watching the subtle tensing and relaxing of his abdominal muscles and looking over any scars that weren't the two parallel ones on his side and back.

What was so appealing about this? He'd done medical scans for Vince in the past; seeing part of him in person wasn't really anything new. And yet...

Then Vince happened to glance his way and Durandal retreated into his stall, pressing his back to the featureless walls and getting his coat damp. _Dammit_.

“I saw that.” Maybe it was just him, but Vince sounded...amused? Following that was the soft rustling of fabric and Vince asking, “You gonna hide in there forever, dude?”

Durandal trudged back out, following closely behind Vince in the hopes that it would make it harder for passers-by to see his face.

–

They found Cortana typing away at the bridge, three screens alight with maps or reams of raw data; when she heard the doors slide open, she swiveled around in her seat. “So how'd it go?”

Durandal was just the slightest bit too slow in responding. “Not bad, as far as first attempts go,” Vince said. “Well. First attempts in a controlled environment.”

“And I'd like to remind you that in my _actual_ first on-field mission, I defeated several Pfhor without sustaining serious injury,” Durandal huffed. “Enough of this. Do you have any idea which area we should investigate first?”

“Not yet, but I've eliminated one.” Turning back to the screens, Cortana tapped one of them in a specific place. “It's got a direct line to High Command, but only a select few people in the facility have access to it, the authorizations for direct teleports are difficult to obtain, and the only way out on foot that would provide any cover winds through a massive swamp.”

And where there were swamps on Pfhor Prime, there tended to be Lookers.

“These two look pretty similar on the surface,” she went on. “I'll need more time to sort out the finer details and make sure we don't wander into a deathtrap. In the meantime...” Cortana gave Durandal a look over her shoulder. “You gonna keep working on whatever it was you were fiddling with in your study?”

...Oh, right, he'd left the decryption process running. “I'll have to, if I want to decipher it in a reasonable amount of time.”

“I see. There was some weird stuff in there; some kinda stream-of-consciousness rambling.”

Durandal's brow furrowed; he didn't recall encountering anything like that…

“How long do you think it'll be before we can get going?” Vince asked.

Cortana shrugged. “A couple of hours, a day or two—depends on how long it takes me to catch a fatal snag in one target or the other.” She resumed typing, then just had to add: “It's a shame I can't really automate this; I wouldn't mind throwing down with you guys in the gym.”

The last thing Durandal needed was his other sister witnessing some inadequacy of his; he tried very hard not to visibly react in any way. “Let's just focus on choosing a target so we can get this mission over with.”


	8. Red VS Green

Supposedly, Hali Communications was among the best engineering stations available in west Carcosa, full of many of the region's brightest minds and hardest workers creating and making use of bleeding-edge technology, software and hardware alike. Top-notch security and safety, excellent pay, a direct line to High Command—all the usual perks.

What Caerwyn didn't mention when it came time to work on those security measures was that Hali Communications was as bogged down by mind-numbing bureaucracy as everything else.

All of the actual programming and testing was done; it was the approval process that High Command was dragging their asses on. Until word came back, Tycho was effectively stuck here, with nothing more of importance to do except get pestered by the staff.

“Come on.” The off-duty Fighter leaned forward slightly on the table. “You lived on Mars; you have to remember what it was like.”

Tycho pinched the bridge of his nose. “I spent all my time there at an observatory on the edge of the Medusa Desert; that was as far from civilization as you could get on that planet without going to Phobos.”

“But the humans had to have discussed their lives with you or each other at some point, right? Or even just left the news running.”

Well, there was that time a researcher suffered a breakdown on-site over the loss of some relatives in Tharsis, and that other time Tycho had been in the middle of a report when the radio announced that five hundred people had died at Misriah, watching his human co-workers' reactions and futilely racking his digital brain for something, _anything_ , that could help. 

“The humans never got personal with me and I was focused on my work. It wasn't that exciting.” Tycho turned back to the monitors he'd been keeping an eye on previously; when he didn't hear the Fighter wander off, he muttered, “Why are you so interested in Mars, anyway?”

“Because I like knowing things about the planets we conquer or trade with,” the Fighter replied. “I mean, most of the foreign history we're taught in schools begins and ends with our relationship with those planets; we almost never learn anything else unless they're allies.”

Tycho didn't have the heart to tell her that showing empathy for other worlds made it harder for High Command to justify nuking their suns.

While she rambled on about all the rumours she'd overheard from the other members of her unit, Tycho pulled up security camera footage from the sector he currently sat in; largely a mess of person-shaped monochrome shadows shuffling to and fro, broken up by the occasional empty hallway, spread across dozens of windows. If everyone here wasn't relatively well-behaved, this would've been a rather stressful task.

“--and Chamberlain Heulwen was discussing the possibility of colonizing—uh...” The Fighter turned away from her Hunter buddy and tapped Tycho on the arm. “What's the eighth planet in Sol Core's system?”

“Neptune.”

“Yeah, that—she's thinking about colonizing Neptune's moons if we can ever make it there. We heard that the humans expanded to Jupiter a few centuries ago; we'll have to be quick about it if we wanna beat them there...”

One of the moving shapes darted across a window a little too swiftly, and Tycho's gaze snapped to it just in time to catch a glimpse of Compiler robes fluttering behind their owner.

There were no Compilers being utilized at Hali Communications.

Making a mental note of which area that camera was pointed at, Tycho pushed away from the monitors and grabbed his helmet; as he reached the door, he heard the Hunter ask him, “Sir? Has something come up?”

“I'm going out for a bit.” Tycho hit the door switch. “Stay put.”

–

“Hey, Cortana?”

“What?”

“Did your target _have_ to be so close to the offices?”

The four of them—Vince, Cortana, Durandal, Lh'muria—huddled in a dark corner of some indistinct architectural filler, listening carefully for approaching Pfhor. It had only taken them a couple of minutes to find a window to slip through; the lack of decent hiding places and the volume of people was what stretched out what Vince had hoped would be a relatively quick in-and-out to around an hour.

Cortana pulled away from the edge of the wall and whispered back, “It was the most infrequently-used terminal I could find that could connect where we need it to.”

What looked like movement slid across Vince's peripheral vision and he jerked around; there was nothing behind them. Sighing, he turned back to the front, just in time for Cortana to wave everyone forward. 

Hali Communications may have been home to the best and brightest, but architecturally there wasn't that much to distinguish it from any other major Pfhoric facility Vince had infiltrated in the past. His group dashed through several dark and muggy hallways and past a few organic structures whose only purpose seemed to be to maim anyone who got too close, slowing only to avoid alerting whoever might be in the rooms between them and their destination.

As soon as they reached a crossroad between a short flight of stairs and the more mechanical areas of the facility, Cortana made a sharp left and leaped across all the steps in a single bound; everyone followed her and ducked inside the third room along the path, locking the door behind them. Only then did Vince release his hold on Durandal's hand.

Awaiting them was a single column in the center of the room, each of its four sides embedded with a terminal screen and the necessary interfaces to use them. While Vince and Cortana worked on the terminal that faced the door, Durandal inspected the other three; one was shut off entirely, and the remaining two were disconnected from the network.

Cortana retrieved a chip from her pocket and slotted it into the appropriate receptacle. “Shouldn't take me too long,” she muttered while she typed. “You got that laptop ready?”

Vince flipped open the mini-laptop on his forearm and began preparing it for wireless transfer. “One second.”

As they worked, Durandal decided to poke through one of the other active terminals; the first file of interest he came across was a directory of labs, offices, and other important areas. He'd only gotten to read two of the listed names when he felt a presence hovering around his shoulder.

“Do you mind?” Durandal pointed at the other terminal. “You could rummage through that instead of bothering me.”

Lh'muria huffed. “But that's boring.”

“We're on a mission, you two,” Vince snapped. 

Glumly, Lh'muria floated over to the spare terminal and browsed the directory separately; Durandal tuned them back out and resumed reading. Most of the lab names were fairly clinical and obvious about their purposes; lots of 'Engineering' and 'Testing', with the odd 'Dissection' scattered around the outer rim of the sector.

Clicking on individual names yielded a bit more information. Most areas labeled 'Engineering' dealt with hardware and software, with a couple dedicated to whatever tech they crammed inside Hunters; not much beyond that, however. He hovered the cursor over a 'Dissection' for a few seconds, then closed out of the directory entirely and looked for the ones for other sectors.

“Hey, I think this is it!” he heard Cortana state triumphantly; he and Lh'muria walked or floated back around to find her and Vince looking at a list of names and coordinates.

Lh'muria gave it a once-over. “Well, that didn't take long.”

Cortana grinned and pressed a key to scroll down. “Nope. And if I'm right, Gr'ndl Prime should be right about... _here_!”

As soon as she tapped the screen, Vince began copying down the coordinates and other relevant information by hand; between the amount of each and pauses to check for typos, it took about a minute.

“So, we got what we came for,” Lh'muria said. “Should we leave now?”

Durandal gave them a nudge in the side. “Did you see how many locations Cortana scrolled past? We'd be remiss to teleport back up without copying those as well.”

“And I'll bet you anything, Gr'ndl isn't the only black site listed,” Cortana added. “We'll bail if there's trouble, alright?”

Once she returned to the top of the list, Vince resumed typing away. Durandal wandered back over to the other terminal; as much as he'd prefer to make small talk to pass the time, anything that could distract Vince from his task would keep them all here longer. And really, they were quite fortunate to have stayed this long without anyone walking in.

As he poked around records in the hope of finding something worth reading, Durandal kept an eye on the clock in the lower-right corner. Five minutes stretched into ten, then twenty, with no sounds louder than keystrokes.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, thud--?

Vince stopped dead and turned around, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. “What was that?”

“Maybe just the building settling?” Lh'muria offered nervously.

“Sounded like it came from the second floor--”

There came another unpleasantly heavy noise, this time closer and with more of a forceful impact. All four of them kept stone-still for a few seconds, waiting for a third to follow; eventually, Vince unstrapped the laptop from his forearm and handed it to Cortana.

“I'm gonna go see if it's anything we should be worried about,” he told her, and moved to hit the door switch.

Something twinged in Durandal's chest and, before he knew it, he'd rushed over to pull Vince back by the forearm. “Wait! What if you--?” He couldn't bring himself to finish.

Vince gave him a gentle pat on the head. “I'll be fine; don't worry.” After the hold on his arm was released, he added, “Shouldn't take long; I'll signal you guys if I can't get back.”

Durandal watched him leave, not entirely reassured. 

The next few minutes passed in relative silence, save for Cortana tapping away at the keyboard while Durandal scrolled down for her; he tried to distract himself by reading the listed off-world sites and colonies. A few, he recognized from intercepted radio chatter back on Lh'owon; most were unfamiliar. All of them read like alphabet soup, stringing together consonants that rarely met in English.

At the seven minute mark, yet another unknown noise resounded throughout the immediate area, this time even closer and from the opposite end of the first two.

Everyone froze and waited for a follow-up, or for Vince to return with an explanation; neither came to pass.

Something compelled Durandal to head for the door; he made it only a few steps before Cortana said, “What are you doing?”

“Going to investigate,” Durandal replied. “If you hear something else and Vince or I aren't back yet—don't leave.” He ducked out, checked for passing workers, and tread down the hallway as quietly as possible, one hand hovering over the fusion pistol on his belt.

–

That was a terrible idea, he thought.

Durandal clung to a misshapen corner, feeling inadequately concealed by the darkness; he'd made it a ways away from the hideout and hadn't spotted anything out of the ordinary, or what constituted 'ordinary' for the Pfhor. For all he knew, Vince had already determined that some office peon had simply dropped something heavy.

He began to move, then froze at the sight of a worker standing by a nearby hallway; thankfully, they took no notice of him and entered the first room on the right. Durandal exhaled slowly and weighed his options.

There was one last area to the north that the unknown sound could've come from; he'd just have to make a sweep of that, then head back.

One last check of his immediate surroundings, and Durandal crept away from his hiding spot and stole down the corridor, passing by dozens of closed doors and fleshy-looking decorations to arrive at a wide, open room overlooked by some sort of observational walkway. Nothing of interest besides a row of sinewy support pillars near the center; still, Durandal found himself walking further in, just in case.

He searched along the length of the walkway, trying to find signs of an impact; none presented themselves, either there or further away. Didn't seem as though anything had struck the walls or the pillars, either. Durandal sighed; perhaps it really was just the building settling.

He turned to leave, and a hand clamped over his mouth.

Durandal reached up to try and wrench it away, then felt his body being slammed against the nearest wall with enough force to knock the wind out of him. The assailant moved their hand to his upper arm; Durandal snarled, snapped his head up--

“Hey there.”

Tycho smirked at him, the upper half of his face unreadable. 

It took Durandal a moment to realize, once he could think properly again, that he now had blood that could turn to ice; he swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Hello, Tycho. Has High Command demoted you already?”

“I head here on official business and you think I've been demoted. Good to know that your opinion of me is as low as ever.” Tycho's grip tightened painfully. “Well, I'm not too happy with you, either. In fact, if I didn't need answers, I'd have snapped your spine in half already.”

Had to remain calm—at least keep his breathing steady. Could he just run back to their hiding place?.. No; that would lead Tycho to the others, and Vince might not have returned yet--

“What are you doing here?” Tycho snapped; he leaned in closer, jerking Durandal back into position when he tried to shrink away. “You have one minute before I get impatient.”

Durandal remembered what 'impatience' had entailed during that endless month on Lh'owon. “Just thought I'd look around,” he lied. “Nothing more to it, really--”

The rest of it was cut off by Tycho digging his fingers into Durandal's arm. “How stupid do you think I am?” he growled. “That's twenty seconds, by the way. You have forty left. Answer me.”

Despite himself, Durandal winced; he inhaled deeply once more and tried again. “I—I came here to map the place out. That's it. There's no one else--”

“Not even that Compiler?”

His words caught in his throat a few seconds too long.

Tycho leaned back just far enough to get out of Durandal's face, but still be nauseatingly close. “I'd have thought that acquiring your own crew would make you a better liar,” he said, ill-intent palpable in his voice. “You certainly put Callahan through enough of it--”

Durandal kicked Tycho in the leg and caused him to reflexively release his hold before those words had even finished being processed.

The fusion pistol came off his belt; Durandal bolted towards the center of the room, turned, and fired a volley of shots at Tycho, each one barely missing him as he rapidly circled around. After dodging the fifth shot, Tycho changed course and charged straight at Durandal, leaning slightly to avoid a sixth bolt aimed at his head; before Durandal could react, Tycho seized him by the arm, grabbed the fusion pistol and hurled it into some dark corner too far away to risk searching in.

“You're a lousy shot, you know that?” Tycho sneered, then threw a punch at Durandal's face. Not knowing whether to try and catch it or dodge, Durandal ending up doing both; with the few seconds that granted him, he kicked Tycho again, this time in the side. Tycho didn't let go of his arm, but the impact loosened his grip just enough for Durandal to pull it away himself. With both hands free again, he wrenched Tycho downwards by his duster lapel and slugged him in the exposed lower half of his face, hoping it would cause him to stagger.

The punch did snap his head to the left, but Tycho remained upright. Slowly, he turned to glare at Durandal, blood trickling down the side of his face.

A voice in the back of Durandal's head screamed at him to move, but something had locked up.

“Is that all you've got?”

He drew back his right arm, and Durandal let go of his duster and started moving away to put some distance between them--

The blow caught Durandal in the ribs just below his torso armour, bone-equivalent cracking and splintering under Tycho's fist.

Durandal staggered back, gasping and clutching at the spot; he opened one bleary eye, saw Tycho walking towards him, and tried punching; the force behind it had diminished so badly that Tycho could casually slap his arm away. Then he felt something smash into his face.

The next few minutes devolved into a hazy mess of searing pain, with the only flashes of clarity between all the crushing blows being the acrid taste of his own blood; successfully parrying one strike just made Tycho retaliate with another that connected with the shattered area of his chest. Others might have followed that; by the time Durandal could think again, he was on the floor, slumped against the wall and trying to catch his breath.

It could have gotten him killed, and yet Durandal still glared up and managed to pant out, “Are you offended—that I—made you bleed?”

“Oh, no.” Tycho rolled one arm around in its socket to work out the kinks, as if this had just been some workout session. “I'm offended that, after all you subjected me to in the past, you couldn't do better than waste my time. Now, then...” 

As desperately as Durandal tried to move them, his legs had all the consistency and utility of jelly. If he couldn't even stand up, then he couldn't stop Tycho from dragging him away and--

At the halfway point, Tycho stopped dead in his tracks, jerked his head up, and doubled back just in time to avoid the dark figure jumping down from the upper level.

Vince straightened up from his three-point landing, limbs tensed like coils, and growled in a tone of voice that Durandal hadn't heard him use in ages, “ _Back off_.”

Tycho continued to stare at him for a couple of seconds, then raised his fists. That was all Vince needed.

In the time it took Durandal to blink, Vince shot across the room and rammed a fist directly into Tycho's solar plexus; the next punch missed, but only barely, sliding off of Tycho's helmet as he half-stumbled, half-dodged.

The two of them rapidly traded and parried blows, occasionally dodging or rolling out of the path of those that couldn't be blocked easily, and maybe it was just dizziness, but Durandal couldn't quite keep up with all of it—sometimes Tycho would be in the spot he thought Vince had been in or vice-versa, or Vince would move too swiftly to discern exactly how he'd hit Tycho. Every now and then something would actually force a grunt of pain out of Tycho—took some of the sting out of things.

What parts of Vince's side of the fight Durandal could keep up with were, as typical of his security officer, a thing of beauty: powerful and deliberate, with no careless mistakes or wasted actions. A shame that Durandal had to watch him like this.

Tycho took a kick to the shin that would've cracked it if he were human and dropped to the floor on one knee giving Vince a chance to grab him by the lack of the helmet and hurl him face-first into the ground—where he stayed.

In an instant, Vince was at Durandal's side, hooking an arm underneath his legs and another around his back. “Durandal, I—I'm so sorry I didn't get here sooner—I got held up on the way back--”

Durandal would have asked Vince to drop it, had white-hot pain not shot through his chest and forced a sharp gasp out of him; Vince yanked his hand away from Durandal's torso and carefully raised it to just underneath Durandal's arm.

All his remaining energy sort of faded away at once after Vince hoisted him up, and yet he found himself muttering, “Can't I just walk?..”

“Not like this.” Vince ran to the corner, checked for people in the halls, then took off running. “S'gonna be okay, dude,” he added quietly. “Just hang in there.”

There was something Durandal wanted to reply with, but it slipped away from him, along with everything else.

–

By the time Tycho came to and pulled himself back upright, Callahan and his handler were nowhere to be found. Couldn't hear anything in the adjacent hallway or rooms, either.

He swore under his breath and activated his helmet's comm link, currently tuned to the security control room. “Is anyone still there?”

“Yeah,” came the answer. “Why? Is something wrong?..”

“Lock the place down. We've got intruders.”

–

Cortana finished adjusting the activity logs just in time for the door to slide open, and the very first thing she and Lh'muria saw upon turning around was Vince carrying her unconscious, bloodied twin brother.

“ _Oh shit_!” She ran up to the two of them and gingerly placed a hand on Durandal's forearm. Lh'muria floated somewhere above her shoulder, too horrified by their captain's physical state to get any closer. “What happened to him?!”

“I'll explain later,” Vince said tersely. “Lh'muria, call F'tha and tell them to--”

Alarms rang throughout the complex; barely audible underneath the din was a prerecorded warning for Hali's workers to remain in their offices or labs while security cleared the area.

Lh'muria shouted over the racket, “I can't reach F'tha! We've been cut off!”

Growling, Cortana moved around Vince and Durandal to get at the door switch. “Looks like we'll have to run for it,” she said, and pressed it before her teammates could raise any objections.

They ducked under the door as it slid upwards and sprinted or flew full-tilt, hallways and landmarks blurring past them, with Vince holding Durandal as closely to his own body as possible to avoid jostling him too badly; Cortana pulled ahead slightly to check the corner they were about to turn and spotted a Trooper and a Fighter ascending the stairs.

The Trooper fired a grenade in their direction, forcing them to scatter; the explosion rang in Cortana's ears. Undeterred, she charged at the Trooper and buried a fist in their gut, then tore the havoc rifle out of their hands and kicked them back down the stairs. With them out of the way, she cracked the rifle over the Hunter's head—only stunned them, but it would give Vince and Lh'muria time to slip past.

Three more Hunters were barreling towards them as Cortana hopped over the last two steps; she sprayed two of them with bullets and launched a grenade at the third, who ducked just long enough to lose track of the intruders.

A couple more corridors, one with a small squad of Fighters that Cortana was able to startle with warning shots, and she finally spotted the door they'd come out of earlier and directed Vince's and Lh'muria's attention to it; once everyone was inside, Cortana frantically locked the door behind them. Sounded like that Fighter squad was following them; they'd only have a minute, if even that.

Lh'muria quickly undid the latch on the window and shoved it open, then found themselves being carefully handed Durandal. 

“If I try to drop down with him in tow, I'm gonna hurt him,” Vince said; he waited for Lh'muria to float through the open window before climbing through himself. Soon as he'd gotten a steady foothold on the pipe underneath, one of the Fighters cursed angrily over the unresponsive door switch on the other side.

Vince must have heard it, since he forewent going down the safe way and jumped off the top section of pipe, landing with an ease uncharacteristic of the average human. Cortana pulled herself through the window one-handed, turned around on the pipe, and took her own dive—the impact buckled her knees and nearly brought her face into the dirt.

Trying to ignore the pain in her legs, she asked Lh'muria, “Can you get in contact now?”

A brief pause, then Lh'muria nodded. “Grab onto me.”

Cortana and Vince took hold of Lh'muria's shoulders and left Pfhor Prime behind.

–

–

By the time security had determined that the intruders were no longer anywhere on or near the premises and lifted the alert, Tycho was about halfway through his second sweep of the ground floor. The instant the announcement sounded over the loudspeakers, people began cautiously poking their heads out of the hiding places.

“You're sure now?” Tycho asked over the comm link.

“Fairly certain. They must've teleported just out of the cameras' visual range, but the mic still picked it up.”

“Great...” Tycho let his arm drop roughly to his side and trudged back to the stairs. He'd even bothered to grab a knife to pay Callahan back for that insult, and now he couldn't use it. Not today, at least.

The Hunter on the other end of the link tried to be supportive. “Hey, at least things can go back to normal now, right?”

“I guess. See if your team can't patrol outside for a while, in case our visitors try breaking in again.”

On the way back to the security control room, Tycho passed by a couple of medics tending to a small group of guards near the stairs; the Trooper being checked over gave him an awkward salute. “Uh—hey there, Machinated Administrator. You didn't happen to run into that woman, did you?”

That gave Tycho pause. “There was a fourth person with Callahan?”

“Y-yeah—about five-six, with short hair and a purple cloak. Stole my gun right outta my hands and—er, wait, where are you going?”

“To check something,” was the answer Tycho gave them, and he ran the rest of the way to the control room.

It didn't take too long to find the camera he needed, or to rewind the footage to the relevant point. Guards went up the stairs and almost the exact moment Callahan and that Compiler were about to head down, Trooper got attacked…

Even on the physical plane, he could still recognize Cortana.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Hokuto for helping me figure out where to set this chapter, among other things.


End file.
